User-level Memory Manager

The goal of this exercise is to design and implement an user-level memory management library similar to LIBC's malloc. Memory is allocated, released and reallocated by this library.

At initialization, the library must allocate a specific amount of memory from the operating system (e.g. brk, which is thereafter used as a buffer to meet user requests for memory. This buffer must be managed so that free neighbors blocks are merged together, this reducing external fragmentation.

API

The user-level memory manager library must implement, at least, the following interface:

• void * alloc(int size)
  Allocates size bytes of memory, returning a pointer to the allocated area on success and "0" on failure.
• void free(void * ptr)
  Releases memory previously allocated with alloc.
• void * realloc(void * ptr, int new_size)
  Changes the size of the memory block previously allocated with alloc and pointed to by ptr to new_size bytes. The function returns a pointer to the reallocated area on success and "0" on failure.
• void dump(void)
  Prints all memory blocks including both used and free blocks.