Peer to Patent, Community Patent Review

APPLICATION LIST|ARCHIVED APPLICATIONS|US PATENT CLASSIFICATIONS

Home > Discussion

Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070118712

Cooperative mechanism for efficient application memory allocation

Filing Date: November 21, 2020

Inventors: Henri van Riel, Adriaan van de Ven

Assignee: RED HAT, INC.

Current U.S. Classification: 711, 711/170000

Discussion (2)

View: Date|Claims|Prior Art|Action Item|

Facilitator's Comment

Action Item

Show without Noise

Michael Nichols (about 1 year ago)

Claim 1, as written, seems to miss the point of the invention. Reallocating used memory without erasing it first is not, per se, new. "malloc," by definition, means "Give me memory--no need for initialization" (as opposed to "calloc," which zeroes out the memory). This is precisely what a single-process system (think Turbo C++ for DOS) would do.

The point of this invention is that in a multi-process system, you ordinarily can't do what you would have done in DOS without posing a security risk. So instead, you usually make "malloc" work just like "calloc." This invention, however, finds a middle ground by splitting the "free pool" up into a global free pool and local "per-process" free pools: For the global free pool, malloc works like calloc, but if a process can be allocated memory out of its own pool, you can do malloc the old-fashioned way without worrying about security.

Unfortunately, Claim 1 does not distinguish between different kinds of free pools, so as written, it simply reads on the old-fashioned DOS-style malloc.

Manuel Perez (about 1 year ago)

I agree with Michael. Claim 1, as written, does not disclose the whole idea of the invention. Moreover it'is quite broad and a bit unclear. Consequently, there are many documents which can be used against the novelty of claim 1.

0 days left