Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Garrett Leischner

John R Douceur

Edmund Bernard Nightingale

Landy Wang

Baskar Sridharan

Matthew Jeremiah Eason

Andrew J Lagattuta

Arun Upadhyaya Kishan

Hari R Pulapaka

Matthew Ryan Miller

Gregory John Colombo

Evan Lincoln Tice

Stephen L Hufnagel

A system and method for mitigating memory errors in a computer system. Faulty memory is identified and tested by a memory manager of an operating system. The memory manager may perform diagnostic tests while the operating system is executing on the computer system. Regions of memory that are being used by software components of the computer system may also be tested. The memory manager maintains a stored information about faulty memory regions. Regions are added to the stored information when they are determined to be faulty by a diagnostic test tool. Memory regions are allocated to software components by the memory manager after checking the stored information about faulty memory regions. This ensures a faulty memory region is never allocated to a software component of the computer system.

Systematic mitigation of memory errors

In response to a memory allocation request received from an application thread, a random number is obtained (e.g., from a random number list previously populated with multiple random numbers). A starting location in at least a portion of a bitmap associated with a region including multiple blocks of the memory is determined based on the random number. A portion of the bitmap is scanned, beginning at the starting location, to identify a location in the bitmap corresponding to an available block of the multiple blocks, and an indication of this available block is returned to the application thread.

Lightweight random memory allocation

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Garrett Leischner