New Allocator features

[Terrell Magee]

I have been using jemalloc for the past year with good results.  Our product
has a couple of new requirements that I have not come across before.



1)      The first is the ability to completely segregate control data from
allocated data.  This makes the allocator more like a resource manager in
that you allocate and mange the resource but have no access to it.  The data
structure design of jemalloc lends itself fairly well to meeting this
requirement.

2)      The second requirement is focused on multi-node NUMA systems.
Consider the requirement to allocate memory on a specified node.  A buffer
is returned to the application on the requested node but the application
then migrates the data to another node for processing.  When the app frees
the buffer, it is returned to the allocator’s free pool.  The problem is the
memory is now located on the wrong node.  Subsequent allocations can result
in misplaced data and performance anomalies.  This behavior is true for any
allocator; libc malloc(3), etc.



Have these types of requirements been considered or solved by other systems?



Thanks

Terrell

Convey Computer Systems
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