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The CPU in modern computer hardware performs reads and writes to memory most efficiently when the data is naturally aligned, which generally means that the data's memory address is a multiple of the data size. For instance, in a 32-bit architecture, the data may be aligned if the data is stored in four consecutive bytes and the first byte lies ...
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1]: 105–208 The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they receive ...
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.
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 ...
Each segment was placed at a specific location in memory by the software being executed and all instructions that operated on the data within those segments were performed relative to the start of that segment. This allowed a 16-bit address register, which would normally be able to access 64 KB of memory space, to access 1 MB of memory space.
Operating systems supporting virtual memory assign processes a virtual address space and each process refers to addresses in its execution context by a so-called virtual address. To access data such as code or variables at that address, the process must translate the address to a physical address in a process known as virtual address ...
A processor with 128-bit byte addressing could directly address up to 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) bytes, which would greatly exceed the total data captured, created, or replicated on Earth as of 2018, which has been estimated to be around 33 zettabytes (over 2 74 bytes). [1] A 128-bit register can store 2 128 (over 3.40 × 10 38) different
The number of address spaces available depends on the underlying address structure, which is usually limited by the computer architecture being used. Often an address space in a system with virtual memory corresponds to a highest level translation table, e.g., a segment table in IBM System/370.