The purpose of this lab is to write a custom dynamic storage allocator for C programs, i.e., our own version of the malloc, free, and realloc routines. The overall goal is to implement a correctly working, fast, and efficient allocator.

The dynamic storage allocator will consist of the following four functions, which are declared in mm.h and defined in mm.c: (1) int mm_init(void); (2) void *mm_malloc(size_t size); (3) void mm_free(void *ptr); (4) void *mm_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size);

The semantics outlined in the handout match the semantics of the corresponding libc malloc, realloc, and free routines. Type man malloc to the shell for complete documentation.

The driver program mdriver.c in the source code distribution tests the mm.c package for correctness, space utilization, and throughput. Each trace file contains a sequence of allocate, reallocate, and free directions that instruct the driver to call the mm_malloc, mm_realloc, and mm_free routines in some sequence.

The driver mdriver.c accepts the following command line arguments:

./mdriver -t -f -h -I -v -V -d n