A Modern and Competitive Lock-Free Dynamic Memory Allocator

Ricardo Leite and Ricardo Rocha

September 2018

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Abstract

This paper presents LRMalloc, a lock-free memory allocator that leverages lessons of modern memory allocators and combines them with a lock-free scheme. Current state-of-the-art memory allocators possess good performance but lack desirable lock-free properties, such as, priority inversion tolerance, kill-tolerance availability, and/or deadlock and livelock immunity. LRMalloc's purpose is to show the feasibility of lock-free memory management algorithms, without sacrificing competitiveness in comparison to commonly used state-of-the-art memory allocators, especially for concurrent multithreaded applications.

Bibtex

@InProceedings{leite-inforum18,
  author =    {R. Leite and R. Rocha},
  title =     {{A Modern and Competitive Lock-Free Dynamic Memory Allocator}},
  booktitle = {10th INForum - Simpósio de Informática (INForum 2018)},
  editor =    {N. Correia and F. Martins},
  month =     {September},
  year =      {2018},
  address =   {Coimbra, Portugal},
}

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