The Storage Allocation Problem
- fixed partitioning leads to internal fragmentation
- variable partitioning leads to external fragmentation
which partition to choose? first fit, best fit, worst fit, next fit?
these strategies don’t help much
- external fragmentation can be fixed by:
compaction (e.g., copying garbage collection)
coalescing (e.g., buddy system)
- these issues arise in heap managers
e.g., runtime support for C++ new and delete