4 stable releases
2.0.1 | Jul 21, 2023 |
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2.0.0 | Jul 20, 2023 |
1.0.1 | Jul 17, 2023 |
1.0.0 | Jul 11, 2023 |
#349 in Memory management
85KB
1.5K
SLoC
Talloc
Note: The project has been renamed to Talc. The new crate is here. This version is unmaintained and I'm open to transferring the crate's ownership (contact me via the email address on my GitHub profile).
Talloc is a performant and flexible no_std
-compatible memory allocator suitable for projects such as operating system kernels, or arena allocation for normal single-threaded apps.
Using Talloc as a simple arena allocator is easy, but practical concerns in no_std
environments are facilitated too, such as custom OOM handling, as well as powerful features like extending and reducing the allocation arena dynamically.
Usage
Use it as a global allocator as follows:
use talloc::*;
#[global_allocator]
static ALLOCATOR: Tallock = Talloc::new().spin_lock();
static mut ARENA: [u8; 1000] = [0; 1000];
fn main() {
// initialize it later...
unsafe { ALLOCATOR.0.lock().init(ARENA.as_mut_slice().into()); }
}
Use it as an arena allocator via the Allocator
API as follows:
use talloc::*;
fn main () {
let mut arena = Box::leak(vec![0u8; 10000].into_boxed_slice());
let tallock = Talloc::new().spin_lock();
unsafe { tallock.0.lock().init(arena.into()); }
let allocator = tallock.allocator_api_ref();
allocator.allocate(..);
}
Performance
O(n) worst case allocations. In practice, it's usually very fast, compared to other allocators. See the benchmarks below.
Deallocation is always O(1), reallocation is usually O(1) unless in-place allocation fails.
Memory Overhead
Allocations have a overhead of one usize
each, typically. The chunk size is at minumum 3 * usize
, so tiny allocations will have a lot of overhead.
This improves on Galloc (another boundary-tagging allocator), which has a minimum chunk size of 4 * usize
.
Benchmarks
galloc's benchmarks:
The original benchmarks have been modified (e.g. replacing rand
with fastrand
) in order to alleviate the overhead.
Random Actions Benchmark Results
Talloc outperforms the alternatives.
Heap Exhaustion Benchmark Results
Talloc falls slightly behind if the time penalization is set right.
Note that:
- no attempt is made to account for interrupts in these timings, however, the results are fairly consistent on my computer.
- alignment requirements are inversely exponentially frequent, ranging from 2^2 bytes to 2^18, with 2^2 and 2^3 being most common
Allocator Microbenchmarks (based on simple_chunk_allocator's benchmark)
Note: pre-fail allocations account for all allocations up until the first allocation failure, at which point heap pressure has become a major factor. Some allocators deal with heap pressure better than others, and many applications aren't concerned with such cases (where allocation failure results in a panic), hence they are seperated out for seperate consideration.
RESULTS OF BENCHMARK: Chunk Allocator
25714 allocation attempts, 25535 successful allocations, 22479 pre-fail allocations, 18067 deallocations
CATEGORY | OCTILE 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | AVERAGE
---------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------|---------
All Allocations | 63 1176 1659 2058 2457 2940 4179 37569 18199587 | 240918 ticks
Pre-Fail Allocations | 84 1134 1596 1953 2289 2688 3234 8400 1562757 | 15753 ticks
Deallocations | 42 147 231 315 420 504 588 672 1932 | 420 ticks
RESULTS OF BENCHMARK: Linked List Allocator
136818 allocation attempts, 106743 successful allocations, 26004 pre-fail allocations, 96369 deallocations
CATEGORY | OCTILE 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | AVERAGE
---------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------|---------
All Allocations | 42 4032 9261 15729 23772 33999 46977 59010 621642 | 29190 ticks
Pre-Fail Allocations | 42 840 2121 3780 5964 8694 12243 17514 614250 | 10781 ticks
Deallocations | 42 3045 6615 10878 15813 21672 28602 38031 107877 | 18880 ticks
RESULTS OF BENCHMARK: Galloc
282102 allocation attempts, 206544 successful allocations, 22751 pre-fail allocations, 196616 deallocations
CATEGORY | OCTILE 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | AVERAGE
---------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|---------
All Allocations | 42 63 63 378 12474 27027 41559 45549 100527 | 19129 ticks
Pre-Fail Allocations | 42 42 42 42 63 63 63 861 21714 | 691 ticks
Deallocations | 42 63 84 84 105 231 294 693 15771 | 262 ticks
RESULTS OF BENCHMARK: Talloc
2193976 allocation attempts, 1545626 successful allocations, 24585 pre-fail allocations, 1534743 deallocations
CATEGORY | OCTILE 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | AVERAGE
---------------------|--------------------------------------------------|---------
All Allocations | 42 63 63 84 84 105 126 210 38871 | 133 ticks
Pre-Fail Allocations | 42 63 63 84 84 84 105 126 3927 | 100 ticks
Deallocations | 42 84 84 105 105 147 252 336 17115 | 187 ticks
Talloc performs the best, with only Galloc coming close when not under heap pressure. Galloc often allocates slightly faster than Talloc but otherwise takes much longer, whereas Talloc's performance is much more stable. (Galloc uses dedicated bins covering a smaller range of allocations, while Talloc's binning makes a broader range of allocations quick).
Note that:
- no attempt is made to account for interrupts in these timings, however, the results are fairly consistent on my computer.
- number of pre-fail allocations is more noise than signal due to random allocation sizes
- alignment requirements are inversely exponentially frequent, ranging from 2^2 bytes to 2^18, with 2^2 and 2^3 being most common
Algorithms
This is a dlmalloc-style implementation with boundary tagging and bucketing aimed at general-purpose use cases.
The main differences compared to Galloc is that Talloc doesn't bucket by alignment at all, assuming most allocations will require at most a machine-word size alignment, so expect Galloc to be faster where lots of small, large alignment allocations are made. Instead, a much broader range of bucket sizes are used, which should often be more efficient.
Additionally, the layout of chunk metadata is rearranged to allow for smaller minimum-size chunks to reduce memory overhead of small allocations.
Testing
Test coverage on most of the helper types and some sanity checking on the allocation.
Other than that, lots of fuzzing of the allocator. See /fuzz/fuzz_targets/fuzz_arena.rs
Features
spin
(default): Provides theTallock
type (a spin mutex wrapper) that implementsGlobalAlloc
.allocator
(default): Provides anAllocator
trait implementation viaTallock
.
General Usage
Here is the list of methods:
- Constructors:
new
with_oom_handler
- Information:
get_arena
- returns the current arena memory regionget_allocatable_span
- returns the current memory region in which allocations could occurget_allocated_span
- returns the minimum span containing all allocated memory
- Management:
mov
- safely move an initialized Talloc to the specified destinationinit
- initialize or re-initialize the arena (forgets all previous allocations, if any)extend
- initialize or extend the arena regiontruncate
- reduce the extent of the arena regionspin_lock
- wraps the Talloc in a Tallock, which supports theGlobalAlloc
andAllocator
APIs
- Allocation:
malloc
free
grow
shrink
See their docs for more info.
Span
is a handy little type for describing memory regions, because trying to manipulate Range<*mut u8>
or *mut [u8]
or base_ptr
-size
pairs tends to be inconvenient or annoying. See Span::from*
and span.to_*
functions for conversions.
Advanced Usage
Instead of using Talloc::new
, use Talloc::with_oom_handler
and pass in a function pointer. This function will now be called upon OOM. This can be useful for a number of reasons, but one possiblity is dynamically extending the arena as required.
#![feature(allocator_api)]
use talloc::*;
use core::alloc::Layout;
fn oom_handler(talloc: &mut Talloc, layout: Layout) -> Result<(), AllocError> {
// alloc doesn't have enough memory, and we just got called! we must free up some memory
// we'll go through an example of how to handle this situation
// we can inspect `layout` to estimate how much we should free up for this allocation
// or we can extend by any amount (increasing powers of two has good time complexity)
// this function will be repeatly called until we free up enough memory or
// we return Err(AllocError) at which point the allocation will too.
// be careful to avoid conditions where the arena isn't sufficiently extended
// indefinitely, causing an infinite loop
// some limit for the sake of example
const ARENA_TOP_LIMIT: usize = 0x80000000;
let old_arena: Span = talloc.get_arena();
// we're going to extend the arena upward, doubling its size
// but we'll be sure not to extend past the limit
let new_arena: Span = old_arena.extend(0, old_arena.size()).below(ARENA_TOP_LIMIT);
if new_arena == old_arena {
// we won't be extending the arena, so we should return AllocError
return Err(AllocError);
}
unsafe {
// we're assuming the new memory up to ARENA_TOP_LIMIT is allocatable
talloc.extend(new_arena);
};
Ok(())
}
Caveat for consideration - multithreaded performance
I don't know why, but Talloc gets hit harder by extreme multithreaded contention than Galloc does. While this is not so relevant to most use cases, I'd like to resolve this issue if possible. If anyone has some tips for alleviating this issue, please open an issue!
I've tried aligning the bucket array to be on seperate cache lines, but no change in result. Other than that, I don't know what to try.
Dependencies
~145KB