Buddy

A simple buddy allocator under Apache License 2.0.

No more than 60 lines of code for malloc/free function.

No recursive function.

The code is simple and straightforward as long as you understand what a buddy allocator is and what it is for.

No thorough tests yet. Feel free to test it and bug reports will be greatly appreciated.

I will use it in some microcontroller (MCU) projects, and will keep the code targeting this domain. So thread-safety won't be addressed forever.

The assumptions are:

Single threaded.
No other memory allocator available. The memory pool will be either statically allocated (prefered), or allocated on stack using alloca() if available.

Explanation

There are many web pages explaining the buddy memory allocator. I found this page is particularly helpful with working codes.

http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/opsys/notes/27.shtml

The sample code works, but recursive functions are used. So I rewrite it.

Another modification is free(). The sample code requires the caller providing the size of allocated block. It is used to calculate the block order - in buddy's terminology - of the mem block to be freed. This is inconvenient in real world code.

Exactly ONE BYTE RIGHT BEFORE the allocated chunk is used to store the order.

      4DEADBEEFDEADBEEF....
--------------------------------------
      ^^
      ||
     /  \
  order  block pointer pointing to here,
         which is assured for 4-byte or 
         higher order alignment.

It's value is the round-up of log₂(size) rather than the size itself, so one byte is enough.

Under this design, there is no way to know the exact size passed to malloc() during allocation, but for my application, there is no need to know this. Since I choose the buddy algorithm, I don't mind the internal fragmentation. And 1 byte (as uint8_t) is very economical for MCU applications.

leonardoms/buddy

Buddy

Explanation