How do malloc() and free() work?

Question

I want to know how malloc and free work.

int main() {
    unsigned char *p = (unsigned char*)malloc(4*sizeof(unsigned char));
    m         


        

Answer 1

Memory protection has page-granularity and would require kernel interaction

Your example code essentially asks why the example program doesn't trap, and the answer is that memory protection is a kernel feature and applies only to entire pages, whereas the memory allocator is a library feature and it manages .. without enforcement .. arbitrary sized blocks which are often much smaller than pages.

Memory can only be removed from your program in units of pages, and even that is unlikely to be observed.

calloc(3) and malloc(3) do interact with the kernel to get memory, if necessary. But most implementations of free(3) do not return memory to the kernel¹, they just add it to a free list that calloc() and malloc() will consult later in order to reuse the released blocks.

Even if a free() wanted to return memory to the system, it would need at least one contiguous memory page in order to get the kernel to actually protect the region, so releasing a small block would only lead to a protection change if it was the last small block in a page.

So your block is there, sitting on the free list. You can almost always access it and nearby memory just as if it were still allocated. C compiles straight to machine code and without special debugging arrangements there are no sanity checks on loads and stores. Now, if you try and access a free block, the behavior is undefined by the standard in order to not make unreasonable demands on library implementators. If you try and access freed memory or meory outside an allocated block, there are various things that can go wrong:

• Sometimes allocators maintain separate blocks of memory, sometimes they use a header they allocate just before or after (a "footer", I guess) your block, but they just might want to use memory within the block for the purpose of keeping the free list linked together. If so, your reading the block is OK, but its contents may change, and writing to the block would be likely to cause the allocator to misbehave or crash.
• Naturally, your block may be allocated in the future, and then it is likely to be overwritten by your code or a library routine, or with zeroes by calloc().
• If the block is reallocated, it may also have its size changed, in which case yet more links or initialization will be written in various places.
• Obviously you may reference so far out of range that you cross a boundary of one of your program's kernel-known segments, and in this one case you will trap.

Theory of Operation

So, working backwards from your example to the overall theory, malloc(3) gets memory from the kernel when it needs it, and typically in units of pages. These pages are divided or consolidated as the program requires. Malloc and free cooperate to maintain a directory. They coalesce adjacent free blocks when possible in order to be able to provide large blocks. The directory may or may not involve using the memory in freed blocks to form a linked list. (The alternative is a bit more shared-memory and paging-friendly, and it involves allocating memory specifically for the directory.) Malloc and free have little if any ability to enforce access to individual blocks even when special and optional debugging code is compiled into the program.

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^{1. The fact that very few implementations of free() attempt to return memory to the system is not necessarily due to the implementors slacking off. Interacting with the kernel is much slower than simply executing library code, and the benefit would be small. Most programs have a steady-state or increasing memory footprint, so the time spent analyzing the heap looking for returnable memory would be completely wasted. Other reasons include the fact that internal fragmentation makes page-aligned blocks unlikely to exist, and it's likely that returning a block would fragment blocks to either side. Finally, the few programs that do return large amounts of memory are likely to bypass malloc() and simply allocate and free pages anyway.}