MEMORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AND METHOD

摘要

A constant time memory management system is disclosed. The system comprises a storage device (4) containing at least one file (11) broken into frames of data for swapping into a memory (7). Each frame contains storage blocks of space. The memory (7) comprises a cache (15) composed of numbered pages for caching swapped in frames and a page list heads list (14) comprising at leas t one list head entry. Each numbered page contains data frames that contain memory blocks for data storage or header frames that contain frame meta data . Each list head entry stores a page number identifying a first of the numbere d pages that contains free memory blocks of a given block size. A processor is connected to the memory and comprises means for allocating the one memory block responsive to a memory request by looking up the numbered page identified by the page number stored in the one list head entry.