Boundary Analysis for Buddy Systems

Abstract

For the past 3 decades, the buddy system has been the method of choice for memory allocation because of its speed and simplicity. However, the software realization indicates that the buddy system incurs the overhead of internal fragmentation, external fragmentation, and memory traffic due to splitting and coalescing memory blocks. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the buddy system. All problems associating with buddy system will be extensively investigated. These problems include internal fragmentation, boundary and size blind spots which are the major causes for external fragmentation, and lastly splitting and coalescing overhead that can slow down the system performance.