In the first chapter, we had brief discussion about an important abstraction called a process. We had discussed the process virtual address space and its isolation, and also have traversed thorough the memory management subsystem and gained a thorough understanding of various data structures and algorithms that go into physical memory management. In this chapter, let's extend our discussion on memory management with details of virtual memory management and page tables. We will look into the following aspects of the virtual memory subsystem:
- Process virtual address space and its segments
- Memory descriptor structure
- Memory mapping and VMA objects
- File-backed memory mappings
- Page cache
- Address translation with page tables