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Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
When memory is allocated it determines which memory locations will be assigned. It tracks when memory is freed or unallocated and updates the status. This is distinct from application memory management, which is how a process manages the memory assigned to it by the operating system.
Traditionally, low-memory-footprint programs were of importance to running applications on embedded systems where memory would often be a constrained resource [1] – so much so that developers typically sacrificed efficiency (processing speeds) just to make program footprints small enough to fit into the available RAM.
Process creation in Windows is done through the CreateProcessA() system call. A new process runs in the security context of the calling process, but otherwise runs independently of the calling process. Methods exist to alter the security context in which a new processes runs. New processes are assigned identifiers by which they can be accessed.
Memory requirements are defined after considering demands of the application, operating system, supporting software and files, and other running processes. Optimal performance of other unrelated software running on a multi-tasking computer system is also considered when defining this requirement.
In computer science, in-memory processing, also called compute-in-memory (CIM), or processing-in-memory (PIM), is a computer architecture in which data operations are available directly on the data memory, rather than having to be transferred to CPU registers first. [1]
A separate user mode can also be used to build efficient virtual machines – see Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements. With enough privileges, processes can request the kernel to map part of another process's memory space to its own, as is the case for debuggers.
DOS and other real mode programs, limited to 20-bit addresses, could only access this space through EMS emulation on the extended memory, or an EMS analog for extended memory. Microsoft developed a standard known as the Extended Memory Specification (XMS). Accessing the memory above the HMA required usage of the protected mode of the 286 CPU.