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Virtual memory makes application programming easier by hiding fragmentation of physical memory; by delegating to the kernel the burden of managing the memory hierarchy (eliminating the need for the program to handle overlays explicitly); and, when each process is run in its own dedicated address space, by obviating the need to relocate program code or to access memory with relative addressing.
The memory mapping process is handled by the virtual memory manager, which is the same subsystem responsible for dealing with the page file. Memory mapped files are loaded into memory one entire page at a time. The page size is selected by the operating system for maximum performance. Since page file management is one of the most critical ...
File-backed mapping maps an area of the process's virtual memory to files; that is, reading those areas of memory causes the file to be read. It is the default mapping type. Anonymous mapping maps an area of the process's virtual memory not backed by any file, made available via the MAP_ANONYMOUS/MAP_ANON flags.
As an alternative to tagging page table entries with process-unique identifiers, the page table itself may occupy a different virtual-memory page for each process so that the page table becomes a part of the process context. In such an implementation, the process's page table can be paged out whenever the process is no longer resident in memory.
In virtual memory implementations and memory management units, a memory map refers to page tables or hardware registers, which store the mapping between a certain process's virtual memory layout and how that space relates to physical memory addresses. In native debugger programs, a memory map refers to the mapping between loaded executable(or ...
A few computers have a main memory larger than the virtual address space of a process, such as the Magic-1, [34] some PDP-11 machines, and some systems using 32-bit x86 processors with Physical Address Extension. This nullifies a significant advantage of paging, since a single process cannot use more main memory than the amount of its virtual ...
An iconic example of virtual-to-physical address translation is virtual memory, where different pages of virtual address space map either to page file or to main memory physical address space. It is possible that several numerically different virtual addresses all refer to one physical address and hence to the same physical byte of RAM.
This technique protects memory used by one process against access or modification by another. By itself it does not protect memory from erroneous access by the owning process. It also allows programs to be easily relocated in memory, since only the base and bounds registers have to be modified when the program is moved.