Virtual Memory

Tags

comp-arch

Is the modern approach to memory-management for a process. Each process in a system sees the systems memory as a continuous range that's all available to it. In reality system memory is chunked into virtual memory, meaning when a process references address 1234, it may be directed to address 1876482 on the actual machine hardware.

Nowadays processes are rarely (only on embedded devices) given direct access to physical memory. Instead processes are isolated into virtual memory, where no process can access another processes memory.

In practice virtual memory requires a lookup table. A way to associate a virtual address to a physical address for a given process.