Free Space Management in Operating System (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 24 Apr, 2026

Free space management involves managing the available storage space on the hard disk or other secondary storage devices. To reuse the space released from deleting the files, a free space list is maintained. The free space list can be implemented mainly as:

Free Space Management

• Bitmap or Bit vector
• Linked List
• Boundary Tags
• Free List

Bitmap or Bit vector

In this approach, A Bitmap or Bit Vector is series or collection of bits where each bit corresponds to a disk block. The bit can take two values 0 and 1:

• 0 indicates that the block is free and 1 indicates an allocated​ block.
• The given instance of disk blocks on the disk in Figure 1 can be represented by a bitmap of 16 bits as: 1111000111111001.
  
  Bitmap

**Advantages:

• Simple to understand.
• Finding the first free block is efficient. It requires scanning the words (a group of 8 bits) in a bitmap for a non-zero word. (A 0-valued word has all bits 0). The first free block is then found by scanning for the first 1 bit in the non-zero word.

**Disadvantages:

• For finding a free block, Operating System needs to iterate all the blocks which is time consuming.
• The efficiency of this method reduces as the disk size increases.

Linked List

In this approach, Free blocks are linked together in a list. Each free block stores the address of the next free block. The list is maintained dynamically as blocks are allocated and freed.

Linked List

**Note: The free space list head points to Block 5 which points to Block 6, the next free block and so on. The last free block would contain a null pointer indicating the end of free list.

**Advantages:

• The total available space is used efficiently using this method.
• Dynamic allocation in Linked List is easy, thus can add the space as per the requirement dynamically.

**Disadvantages:

• When the size of Linked List increases, the headache of maintaining pointers is also increases.
• This method is not efficient during iteration of each block of memory.
• I/O is required for free space list traversal.

In this approach, Each block contains a boundary tag indicating its size and whether it is free or occupied. Adjacent free blocks are merged during deallocation to reduce fragmentation.

**Advantages:

• Useful in memory management systems.
• Simplifies coalescing of adjacent free blocks.

**Disadvantages:

• Slight overhead in storing tag information.
• More complex than bitmap or linked list.

Free List

In this approach, The free blocks are maintained in a list (array or linked list). Each entry in the free list points directly to a free block on disk.

Free List

**Advantages:

• Fast allocation as free blocks are known upfront.
• Easy to traverse and maintain.

**Disadvantages:

• Extra memory needed to store the list.
• May suffer from fragmentation over time.