A system uses specialized software instructions for efficient management
of freelists. In a preferred embodiment, special load and store
instructions are provided. The load instruction is mapped to a register
or memory location. When the load instruction is performed, hardware uses
a bit-map free slot map to return an index of a free slot. Similarly, the
store instruction is used to release, or free, a slot. The store
instruction allows software to specify an index of a slot to be freed.