METHOD, APPARATUS, AND COMPUTER-READABLE MEDIUM FOR PROVIDING PHYSICAL MEMORY MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

A method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for providing memory management functions are provided. According to one method, a memory allocation process is exposed that receives a requested memory size with a memory allocation request and returns a pointer to an area of allocated memory of the requested memory size if available. A memory deallocation process is also exposed that receives requests to deallocate previously allocated memory regions in the form of a pointer to the memory region to be deallocated. The allocation and deallocation processes maintain a list of linked lists, each of the linked lists describing an unallocated portion of the memory. Only a single linked list must be updated by the allocation process. The deallocation process adds a new linked list and rebuilds the list of linked lists to merge any linked lists corresponding to adjacent portions of memory.