Communications of the ACM
Dynamic storage allocation systems
SOSP '67 Proceedings of the first ACM symposium on Operating System Principles
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As computer systems grew in complexity, the area of memory management has become increasingly important. In future operating systems what is needed is a generalized, flexible, modular, and open ended-design of the functional modules (e.g. memory management modules). To achieve these properties, sufficient ingenuity and effort are required during both design and implementation. This paper outlines an approach which should lead to a design having these properties. A memory management system was designed using this generalized approach. The system was subsequently modeled and implemented in SIMSCRIPT I.5 as a test case. The model and the successful results prove the feasibility of the approach and can be used to evaluate different memory management schemes. The functional modules within the model are general so that their mode of operation can be set from outside (this may be called parametric generality). However, the actual algorithm employed for memory management can be tailored at the site generation (or system generation) time using a convenient specification language. This design strategy is best characterized by the term "Algorithmic Generality."