winterrdog/mm-allocator

a simple memory allocator written in pure C with reimplementations of malloc,calloc,realloc and free using singly linked lists. inspired by https://github.com/arjun024/memalloc

mm-allocator

a simple memory allocator written in pure C with reimplementations of malloc,calloc,realloc and free using singly linked lists

How to use

1. Clone the repository
2. Compile the source code using the following command

bash compile.sh

3. Run the compiled executable. I'll test it with the ls command

LD_PRELOAD=./mm.so /usr/bin/ls # or just ls or any other program

The way this works is that the LD_PRELOAD environment variable is used to load the shared library mm.so before the ls command is executed. This will cause the malloc, calloc, realloc and free functions to be redirected to the ones in our custom memory allocator. By default, LD_PRELOAD points to the standard C library, so we are essentially replacing the standard memory allocation functions with our custom ones.

You can see it in action here

NOTE

This program is quite limited in functionality and is not meant to be used in production. It is just a simple demonstration of how memory allocation works under the hood. The program is not thread-safe and does not handle memory fragmentation. It is just a simple implementation to understand the basic concepts of memory allocation. Therefore it can seriously segfault if used inappropriately.