DMMX: Dynamic Memory Management Extension

Automatic Dynamic Memory Management (ADMM) allows programmers to be more productive, increases system reliability and functionality. However, the true characteristics of these ADMM algorithms are known to be slow and non-deterministic. It is a well known fact that object-oriented applications tend to be dynamic memory intensive. Therefore, it is imperative that the programmers must decide whether or not the benefits of ADMM outweigh the shortcomings. In many object-oriented real-time and embedded systems, the programmers agree that the shortcomings are too severe for ADMM to be used in their applications. Therefore, these programmers while using Java or C++ as the development language, decide to allocate memory either statically or on the stack. In this paper, we present the design of an application specific instruction extension called the Dynamic Memory Management eXtension (DMMX) that would allow automatic dynamic memory management to be done in the hardware. Our highperformance scheme allows both allocation and garbage collection to be done in a predictable fashion. The allocation is done through the modified buddy system which allows constant time object creation. The garbage collection algorithm is mark-sweep, where the sweeping phase can be accomplished in constant time. This hardware scheme would greatly improve the speed and predictability of ADMM. Additionally, our proposed scheme is an addon approach, which allows easy integration into any CPU, hardware implemented Java Virtual Machine (JVM), or Processor in Memory (PIM).