Anatomy of memory
Regardless of the operating system (OS) on which they operate, all processes utilize memory. The way that memory is maintained varies from one OS to another. Physical memory isn't directly accessed by processes. When a process is accessed, the CPU converts the virtual address into a physical address. As a result, numerous values (for example, 0x12345678) can be stored at the same address (in other words, 0x12345678) while in distinct processes since they all relate to different physical memory addresses.
A virtual address is allocated to a process when it is launched in the computer environment. For example, in a Win32 environment, the address range is 0x00000000
to 0xFFFFFFFF
, with userland processes ranging from 0x00000000
to 0x7FFFFFFF
, and kernel processes ranging from 0x7FFFFFFF
to 0xFFFFFFFF
.
Memory consists of a few components, which are illustrated in the following diagram. We will cover the important parts of this diagram in relation to the chapter...