mattconte/tlsf

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1603 stars · 239 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

TLSF (Two-Level Segregated Fit) is a real-time memory allocator implementation in C offering O(1) malloc, free, realloc, and memalign with low fragmentation and minimal overhead. It supports multiple memory pools that can be added and removed at runtime, and is designed for embedded and real-time systems.

Use cases

• real-time memory allocator with O(1) malloc and free
• embedded systems heap allocator with low fragmentation
• custom allocator for memory pools in C
• deterministic allocator for game consoles or RTOS
• allocator with fixed 4-byte per-allocation overhead
• manage multiple memory pool regions dynamically

When to choose

• you need deterministic O(1) allocation timing for real-time or embedded systems
• you manage fixed memory pools and want low fragmentation and tiny footprint
• you need a small, portable C allocator without thread-safety overhead

When to avoid

• you need a thread-safe allocator out of the box
• you require a specific license (the repo lacks an explicit license file)
• you need general-purpose system allocator features like huge pages or NUMA awareness

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

embedded embedded-systems developer-tools performance c cpp embedded cross-platform memory-allocator tlsf real-time o1-allocator heap memory-management allocator

Member repositories

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