Reliable General Purpose Dynamic Memory Management for Real-Time Systems

Traditional dynamic memory management techniques for imperative programming lan-guages are unsuitable for reliable real-time applications because their worst-case time and space requirements are insufficiently bounded. This is demonstrated by detailed measurements of sev-eral real-world workloads. A special hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection system has been designed to facilitate reliable use of dynamic memory in hard real-time systems. By ana-lyzing the dynamic memory use of application software, the real-time developer can prove com-pliance with time and space constraints. Analysis techniques are presented and the real-time per-formance of the hardware-assisted garbage collection system is compared to that of traditional allocators