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The physical address of computer memory banks may be mapped to different logical addresses for various purposes. In a system supporting virtual memory, there may actually not be any physical memory mapped to a logical address until an access is attempted. The access triggers special functions of the operating system which reprogram the MMU to ...
Diagram of relationship between the virtual and physical address spaces. In computing, a physical address (also real address, or binary address), is a memory address that is represented in the form of a binary number on the address bus circuitry in order to enable the data bus to access a particular storage cell of main memory, or a register of memory-mapped I/O device.
Another 16-bit register can act as an offset into a given segment, and so a logical address on this platform is written segment:offset, typically in hexadecimal notation. In real mode, in order to calculate the physical address of a byte of memory, the hardware shifts the contents of the appropriate segment register 4 bits left (effectively ...
An address bus is a bus that is used to specify a physical address. When a processor or DMA-enabled device needs to read or write to a memory location, it specifies that memory location on the address bus (the value to be read or written is sent on the data bus). The width of the address bus determines the amount of memory a system can address.
Address spaces are created by combining enough uniquely identified qualifiers to make an address unambiguous within the address space. For a person's physical address, the address space would be a combination of locations, such as a neighborhood, town, city, or country. Some elements of a data address space may be the same, but if any element ...
An example is a 32-bit x86 processor with 4 GB and without Physical Address Extension (PAE). In this case, the processor is able to address all the RAM installed and no more. However, even in this case, paging can be used to support more virtual memory than physical memory. For instance, many programs may be running concurrently.
The offset part of the logical address contains an offset inside the segment, i.e. the physical address can be calculated as physical_address = segment_part × 16 + offset, if the address line A20 is enabled, or (segment_part × 16 + offset) mod 2 20, if A20 is off. [clarification needed] Every segment has a size of 2 16 bytes.
In a computer using virtual memory, accessing the location corresponding to a memory address may involve many levels. In computing, a memory address is a reference to a specific memory location in memory used by both software and hardware. [1] These addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits, typically displayed and handled as unsigned ...