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Beneath every malloc library's public interface there is the underlying operating system's memory management interface. This provides features which can be as simple as giving processes the ability to allocate a new block of memory for themselves, or it can offer advanced features such as protecting areas of memory from being read or written. Some embedded systems have no operating systems and hence no support for dynamic memory allocation, and so the malloc library must instead allocate blocks of memory from a fixed-sized array. The mpatrol library can be built to support all of the above types of system, but the more features an operating system can provide it with, the more it can do.
On operating systems such as UNIX and Windows, all dynamic memory allocation requests from a process are dealt with by using a feature called virtual memory. This means that a process cannot perform illegal requests without them being denied, which protects the other running processes and the operating system from being affected by such errors. However, on AmigaOS and Netware platforms there is no virtual memory support and so all processes effectively share the same address space as the operating system and any other running processes. This means that one process can accidentally write into the data structures of another process, usually causing the other process to fail and bring down the system. In addition, a process which allocates a lot of memory will result in there being less available memory for other running processes, and in extreme cases the operating system itself.