Memory Manager

Overview

This chapter describes how your application can use the Memory Manager to manage memory both in its own partition and outside its partition. Ordinarily, you allocate memory in your application heap only. You might, however, occasionally need to access memory outside of your application partition, or you might want to create additional heap zones within your application partition.

You need to read this chapter if you want to use Memory Manager routines other than those described in the chapter "Introduction to Memory Management" in this book. That chapter shows how to use the Memory Manager and other system software components to perform the most common memory-manipulation operations while avoiding heap fragmentation and low memory situations. This chapter addresses a number of other important memory-related issues.

This chapter begins with a description of areas of memory that are outside your application's partition and their typical uses. Then it describes how you can

• allocate temporary memory
• allocate memory in and install code into the system heap
• read and change the values of system global variables
• allocate high memory during the startup process
• create additional heap zones within your application's partition
• install a purge-warning procedure for a heap zone

This chapter also addresses some advanced topics that are generally of use only to developers of very specialized applications or memory utilities. These advanced topics include

• how the Memory Manager organizes heap zones
• how the Memory Manager organizes memory blocks

To use this chapter, you should be familiar with ordinary use of the Memory Manager and other system software components that allow you to manage memory, as described in the chapter " Introduction to Memory Management ."