First time using malloc installs heap?
I had a bug, which I have now fixed, but which I need to explain in the report.
I am working on an embedded device running FreeRTOS that does its own heap memory management. FreeRTOS has its own version of malloc (), pvPortMalloc () which I was not aware of and used, fixed the memory issues I had.
My question is about the size of the memory overflow caused by malloc (), the data size was only 8 bytes, however the size of the overflow was significant, kilobytes if not more. My guess is the first and only use of malloc in this application that created a second heap in competition with the FreeRTOS heap, at least a few kb is the size.
Can someone confirm this or give a better explanation. Pointers to more information or links were highly appreciated.
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This is a common feature of many malloc implementations to request more memory from the system than is needed for a single request. For example glibc ptmalloc has the following:
#define MINIMUM_MORECORE_SIZE (64 * 1024)
This serves as a lower bound on the amount of memory (in bytes) to request from the OS (through sbrk()
) at one time. Thus, you would expect to see one tiny 64K "in use" allocation result.
One of the reasons for doing this is to reduce system calls; the other might be to reduce fragmentation.
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