Memory Management 1

Introduction
I’m writing this tutorial in an attempt to help you to write a memory manager for your own OS. I assume that you’ve decided to try and write your own OS kernel, and that you’ve got past the “boot-and-print-a-message” stage. Congratulations – you’ve got further than most people.

A memory manager (that is, a physical memory manager) is one of the components at the lowest level of every operating system, and it is vital for the splitting-up of your computer’s memory. Note that there might be several memory managers in your kernel, each working at a different level. I’ll be explaining the lowest-level one here. The allocator here won’t work as a malloc() unless you’re happy with a 4096-byte granularity.

Tim Robinson · timothy.robinson@ic.ac.uk · http://www.themoebius.org.uk/

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