Getting the lowest free virtual memory address in windows.

Question

Title says it pretty much all : is there a way to get the lowest free virtual memory address under windows ? I should add that I am interested by this information at the beginning of the program (before any dynamic memory allocation has been done).

Why I need it : trying to build a malloc implementation under Windows. If it is not possible I would have to really to whatever VirtualAlloc() returns when given NULL as first parameter. While you would expect it to do something sensible, like allocation memory at the bottom of what is available, there are no guarantees.

Answer 1

The OS uses more complicated metrics than just what is the "lowest" memory address available. Specifically, VirtualAlloc allocates pages of memory, so depending on how much you're asking for, at least one page of unused address space has to be available at the starting address. So even if you think there's a "lower" address that it should have used, that address might not have been compatible with the operation that you asked for.

Answer 2

This can be implemented yourself by using VirtualQuery looking for pages that are marked as free. It would be relatively slow though. (You will also need to consider allocation granularity which is different from page size.)

I will say that unless you need contiguous blocks of memory, trying to keep everything close together is mostly meaningless since if two pages of virtual memory might be next to each other in the address space, there is no reason to assume they are close to each other in physical memory. In fact, even if they are close to each other at some point in time, if those pages get moved to backing store and then faulted back into memory, the page would not be faulted to the same physical address page.