Deterministic Memory Allocation for Mission-Critical Linux

Dynamic memory allocation tends to be non-deterministic; the time taken to allocate memory may not be predictable and the memory pool may become fragmented, resulting in unexpected allocation failures …

Dynamic memory allocation tends to be non-deterministic; the time taken to allocate memory may not be predictable and the memory pool may become fragmented, resulting in unexpected allocation failures. RT-alloc is a new experimental open source implementation, aiming for he behavior in multi-threading cache-friendly code, bookkeeping memory overhead, and real-time guarantees. This user-space approach does not require modifying all applications to make them RT-aware, although additional benefits accrue when at least some process within the system actively cooperate with the allocator. In addition, Linux-specific system calls such as madvise are used to perform fine-grained tweaks for PREEMPT_RT environments.