Specialized Hardware Support for Dynamic Storage Allocation

With the advent of operating systems and programming languages that can evaluate and guarantee real-time specifications, applications with real-time requirements can be authored in higher-level languages. For example, a version of Java suitable for real-time (RTSJ) has recently reached the status of a reference implementation, and it is likely that other implementations will follow. Analysis to show the feasibility of a given set of tasks must take into account their worst-case execution time, including any storage allocation or deallocation associated with those tasks. In this thesis, we present a hardware-based solution to the problem of storage allocation and (explicit) deallocation for real-time applications. Our approach offers both predictable and low execution time: a storage allocation request can be satisfied in the time necessary to fetch one word from memory