Resolution of dynamic memory allocation/deallocation and pointers

摘要

One of the greatest challenges in C/C++-based design methodology is to efficiently map C/C++ models into hardware. Many of the networking and multimedia applications implemented in hardware or mixed hardware/software systems are making use of complex data structures stored in one or multiple memories. As a result, many of the C/C++ features which were originally designed for software applications are now making their way into hardware. Such features include dynamic memory allocation/deallocation and pointers used to manage data. This inventors present a solution for efficiently mapping arbitrary C code with pointers and malloc/free into hardware. This solution fits current memory management methodologies. It consists of instantiating a hardware allocator tailored to an application and a memory architecture. This work also supports the resolution of pointers without restriction on the data structures. An implementation using the SUIF framework is presented, followed by some case studies such as the realization of a video filter.