From LQWiki

An arena is the area of memory attached to a process by brk(2) and sbrk(2) and used by malloc(3) as dynamic storage. So named from a malloc: corrupt arena message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible value in the free block list.

See Also

• memory leak
• smash the stack

This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.