How do you dynamically allocate memory in Mac OS X assembly?

Question

I would like to dynamically allocate memory from an assembly program that does not link against the standard C library. Since brk(2) and sbrk(2) are unavailable on Mac OS X (10.6.2), what are the alternatives?

(I'm guessing that it involves a Mach call, but there seems to be little documentation around that)

Why don't you want to link against the C library? – Carl Norum Mar 16 '10 at 17:51 — Carl Norum, Mar 16 '10 at 17:51

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 16 '10 at 17:47

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Probably the easiest thing to do is look at the Darwin sources and see how malloc works internally.

answered Mar 16 '10 at 17:47

Paul R

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 16 '10 at 18:42

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Looks like malloc calls mmap, which calls __mmap, which looks like it's just a syscall

answered Mar 16 '10 at 18:42

Ken Aspeslagh

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How do you dynamically allocate memory in Mac OS X assembly?

2 Answers2