Thrifty-malloc: A HW/SW codesign for the dynamic management of hardware transactional memory in embedded multicore systems

Abstract

We present thrifty-malloc: a transaction-friendly dynamic memory manager for high-end embedded multicore systems. The manager combines modularity, ease-of-use and hardware transactional memory (HTM) compatibility in a light-weight and memory-efficient design. Thrifty-malloc is easy to deploy and configure for non-expert programmers, yet provides good performance with low memory overhead for highly-parallel embedded applications running on massively parallel processor arrays (MPPAs) or many-core architectures. In addition, the transparent mechanisms that increase our manager's resilience to unpredictable dynamic situations incur a low timing overhead in comparison to established techniques.