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# Small changes before rewrite
* Additional bit in remote allocator to prevent type confusion with the backend.
* Move Chunk allocator to backend.
* Improvements to RedBlack tree
* Expose message from Pal
# Complete backend rewrite
This provides two key changes:
* We use buddy allocators to allow memory to reconsolidated
* The backend is factored into a series of small operations that
allocate and deallocate memory.
The backend now uses "Ranges", there are two ranges that don't require a
parent range:
* EmptyRange - Never returns any memory
* PalRange - Returns memory from the platform.
All other ranges require a parent range to supply memory to them. Some
ranges support both allocation and deallocation, and some just
deallocation. For instance, CommitRange supports both, and maps
requests to the parent range, but will Commit and Decommit the memory.
As the ranges perform only a single task, they are generally small and
easy to follow. The two exceptions to this are the two BuddyRanges
(Large and Small). Large is for CHUNK_SIZE and above blocks, while
Small is for below CHUNK_SIZE blocks. Both are implemented with a buddy
allocator, but the SmallBuddyRange uses in place meta-data, while the
LargeBuddyRange uses the pagemap for its meta-data. This means the
LargeBuddyRange can keep the majority of memory it is managing
decommitted.
The Backend glues together the various ranges to support the appropriate
way to manage memory on the platform.
snmalloc
snmalloc is a high-performance allocator.
snmalloc can be used directly in a project as a header-only C++ library,
it can be LD_PRELOADed on Elf platforms (e.g. Linux, BSD),
and there is a crate to use it from Rust.
Its key design features are:
- Memory that is freed by the same thread that allocated it does not require any synchronising operations.
- Freeing memory in a different thread to initially allocated it, does not take any locks and instead uses a novel message passing scheme to return the memory to the original allocator, where it is recycled. This enables 1000s of remote deallocations to be performed with only a single atomic operation enabling great scaling with core count.
- The allocator uses large ranges of pages to reduce the amount of meta-data required.
- The fast paths are highly optimised with just two branches on the fast path for malloc (On Linux compiled with Clang).
- The platform dependencies are abstracted away to enable porting to other platforms.
snmalloc's design is particular well suited to the following two difficult scenarios that can be problematic for other allocators:
- Allocations on one thread are freed by a different thread
- Deallocations occur in large batches
Both of these can cause massive reductions in performance of other allocators, but do not for snmalloc.
Comprehensive details about snmalloc's design can be found in the accompanying paper, and differences between the paper and the current implementation are described here. Since writing the paper, the performance of snmalloc has improved considerably.
Further documentation
Contributing
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