System and method for dynamic memory allocation

Abstract

A method for managing the allocation of memory to one or more applications. The method includes allocating a variety of fixed size memory blocks to a requesting application, each of the fixed size memory blocks being free of header information to maximize memory usage. Free, or unused blocks of data of the same fixed size are maintained in a freelist having a number of block roots corresponding to the number of differently fixed size memory blocks. Each block root stores a root pointer to an unused memory block previously allocated to the application. To conserve memory, each unused memory block will store branch pointers to other identically sized unused memory blocks, thereby forming a sequential chain of unused memory blocks with the block root. Therefore, applications requesting the same sized memory block can re-use previously allocated fixed size memory blocks.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.