Skip to main content

Virtual Address Space and Physical Address Space

Virtual Address Spaceโ€‹

  • virtual address spaces are shared by all threads in the process, but protected from other processes
  • process = program = thread + virtual address space
  • thread = register values + stack
  • because they are logical, they can be up to 2642^{64} bits for 64 bit system, approximately 16 million terabytes.

Physical Address Spaceโ€‹

  • if the memory is big enough, the OS uses the physical memory (RAM)
  • else, least-recently-used data is dumped to the disk
  • only OS can access PAS directly!

VAS and PASโ€‹

  • broken into "pages", usually 4 KB. Most pages will not be used.
  • broken into page-sized block called frames.
  • virtual page can be unallocated, uncached (allocated in disk), cached (allocated in memory).
  • If we access a page not in physical memory, HW generates a page fault exception. Then the OS will bring in the page to physical memory (possibly evicting another page)
    • page size should be fairly large
    • pages in main memory should be fully-associative to reduce conflicts and maximize page hits
    • use OS instead of HW
    • write-back policy

Links to This Note