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However, there still exists the problem of internal fragmentation – memory wasted because the memory requested is a little larger than a small block, but a lot smaller than a large block. Because of the way the buddy memory allocation technique works, a program that requests 66 K of memory would be allocated 128 K, which results in a waste of ...
This diagram represents five contiguous memory regions which each hold a pointer and a data block. The List Head points to the 2nd element, which points to the 5th, which points to the 3rd, thereby forming a linked list of available memory regions. A free list (or freelist) is a data structure used in a scheme for dynamic memory allocation.
The bip buffer (bipartite buffer) is very similar to a circular buffer, except it always returns contiguous blocks which can be variable length. This offers nearly all the efficiency advantages of a circular buffer while maintaining the ability for the buffer to be used in APIs that only accept contiguous blocks. [9]
the stride of an array, or the amount of memory occupied by each element of the array. A program then can refer to the array (or other dope-vector-using object) by referring to the dope vector. This is commonly automatic in high-level languages. Getting to an element of the array costs a tiny bit more (commonly one instruction, which fetches ...
Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. [1] [2] [3] A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping. [4]
Cache: cache represents a small amount of very fast memory. A cache is a storage for a specific type of object, such as semaphores, process descriptors, file objects, etc. Slab: slab represents a contiguous piece of memory, usually made of several virtually contiguous pages. The slab is the actual container of data associated with objects of ...
A memory address a is said to be n-byte aligned when a is a multiple of n (where n is a power of 2). In this context, a byte is the smallest unit of memory access, i.e. each memory address specifies a different byte. An n-byte aligned address would have a minimum of log 2 (n) least-significant zeros when expressed in binary.
The memory cell is the fundamental building block of computer memory. The memory cell is an electronic circuit that stores one bit of binary information and it must be set to store a logic 1 (high voltage level) and reset to store a logic 0 (low voltage level). Its value is maintained/stored until it is changed by the set/reset process.