allocating aligned memory efficiently

[Joel Dice <joel dot dice at gmail dot com>]

Hi all,

I have a problem which involves allocating memory in chunks, each of a 
size which is a multiple of 64K and each aligned to an address divisible 
by 64K.  I'd like to make these allocations as memory-efficient as 
possible, minimizing fragmentation and heap management overhead, and I'd 
like to free each one back to the OS promptly when it's no longer needed.

The posix_memalign(3) and free(3) functions seem to have the semantics I 
want.  Is this pair the most efficient option for my problem, or would I 
be better off using mmap(2) or some other mechanism?

Thanks.