MIPS-Memory-Manager

Memory allocation manager for the MIPS assembly language. Allows memory that has been marked as free to be reused in future calls to alloc.
This code was implemented and tested in MARS (MIPS Assembler and Runtime Simulator).
The purpose of this code was for my own enjoyment and to learn more about memory management. It is provided as is (although contributions are welcome) and while it should save memory consumption for most programs this does come at the cost of additional executed instructions.

Source Files

• MemManagementList.asm provides the key functionality for managing free/allocated/uinitialized memory.
• MemManager.asm the source file which should be included when using the memory manager. Implements alloc and free.
  To use the memory manager the .asm files must be copied to the directory that contains your MARS.jar file.

alloc

Function to allocate new memory either using syscall 9 (to initialize memory on the heap) or by returning memory that was marked free.

free

Function which takes in the address of allocated memory and marks it as free (ready to be used again by a call to alloc).

Example

The provided example sorts an array using recursive MergeSort. Additionally, code to plot the memory impact is provided.
To run the example copy the .asm files to the directory with your MARS.jar file.

• standard_mergesort.asm provides code to run mergesort using syscall 9 directly (syscall 9 allocates heap memory)
• managed_mergesort.asm provides code to run mergesort using memory managment via calls to alloc and free
• standard_impact.txt the result of running standard_mergesort.asm
• managed_impact.txt the result of running managed_mergesort.asm
• plot_impact.py python code to plot the impact data
• Impact_Plot.png a plot of the memory impact of standard and managed MergeSort