Editing Memory management (section)

==== Buddy blocks ====
{{details|Buddy memory allocation}}
In this system, memory is allocated into several pools of memory instead of just one, where each pool represents blocks of memory of a certain [[power of two]] in size, or blocks of some other convenient size progression. All blocks of a particular size are kept in a sorted [[linked list]] or [[Tree data structure|tree]] and all new blocks that are formed during allocation are added to their respective memory pools for later use. If a smaller size is requested than is available, the smallest available size is selected and split. One of the resulting parts is selected, and the process repeats until the request is complete. When a block is allocated, the allocator will start with the smallest sufficiently large block to avoid needlessly breaking blocks. When a block is freed, it is compared to its buddy. If they are both free, they are combined and placed in the correspondingly larger-sized buddy-block list.