Embedded Systems Architecture

Custom implementation

Unlike servers and personal computers, where memory allocations are handled using pages of a specific size, in bare-metal embedded systems the heap is usually a contiguous area of physical memory that can be divided internally using any alignment. Building heap-based memory allocation based on the malloc/free interface consists of keeping track of the requested allocations in memory. This is usually done by prepending a small header in front of each allocation, to track the state and the size of the allocated section, which can be used in the free function to validate the allocated block and make it available for the next allocation. A basic implementation, providing dynamic memory starting from the first available address ...