DMMU: Dynamic Memory Management Unit

Dynamic memory management has been a performance bottleneck in many operating systems including multithreaded and real-time operating systems. Moreover, recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user interface and object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become more memory intensive. The growing popularity of these operating systems and applications increases the importance of high-performance dynamic memory management. Currently, the heap management is done through software routines (e.g. malloc and free in C/C++) and handled in a per process base. This paper presents a hardware implementation of DMMU which will be shared by all the processes in the same way that the TLBs (Translation Look-aside Buffers) used in current MMU. This DMMU employs a novel approach to implement an efficient memory management. Allocation and deallocation are performed in hardware domain. The detailed design and evaluation of the proposed DMMU are presented in this paper. Simulation results show that the hit ratio for 1 Kbits and 8 Kbits buffer are ranging from 78-99% and 95-99%, respectively. At the same time, the memory overhead for 1 Kbits is 10% and for the 8 Kbits is 0%.