Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the boot process of some computers, a memory map may be passed on from the firmware to instruct an operating system kernel about memory layout. It contains the information regarding the size of total memory, any reserved regions and may also provide other details specific to the architecture.
The original design of memory-mapped files came from the TOPS-20 operating system. mmap and associated systems calls were designed as part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of Unix. Their API was already described in the 4.2BSD System Manual, even though it was neither implemented in that release, nor in 4.3BSD. [1]
A memory-mapped file is a segment of virtual memory [1] that has been assigned a direct byte-for-byte correlation with some portion of a file or file-like resource. This resource is typically a file that is physically present on disk, but can also be a device, shared memory object, or other resource that an operating system can reference through a file descriptor.
Memory-mapped I/O, an alternative to port I/O; a communication between CPU and peripheral device using the same instructions, and same bus, as between CPU and memory; Virtual memory, technique which gives an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory, while in fact it is physically fragmented and may even overflow ...
Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. [1] [2] [3] A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping. [4]
When the operating system requested memory to load a program, or a program requested more memory to hold data from a file for instance, it would call the memory handling library. This examined the mappings to look for an area in main memory large enough to hold the request.
In operating systems that use virtual memory, every process is given the impression that it is working with large, contiguous sections of memory. Physically, the memory of each process may be dispersed across different areas of physical memory, or may have been moved ( paged out ) to secondary storage, typically to a hard disk drive (HDD) or ...
Operating systems supporting this mode use page tables to map the regular 4 GB virtual address space into the physical memory, which, depending on the operating system and the rest of the hardware platform, may be as big as 64 GB.