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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 ...
Memory-mapped I/O is preferred in IA-32 and x86-64 based architectures because the instructions that perform port-based I/O are limited to one register: EAX, AX, and AL are the only registers that data can be moved into or out of, and either a byte-sized immediate value in the instruction or a value in register DX determines which port is the source or destination port of the transfer.
A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or separate regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. [ 1 ] [ a ] Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour.
This interface is a far more efficient way to provide bulk data transfer between a device and a userspace application; individual ioctl or read/write system calls inflict overhead due to repeated userspace-to-kernel transitions, where access to a memory-mapped range of addresses incurs no such overhead. Win32
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.
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 ...
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On many systems, a program's virtual address may refer to data which is not currently in memory. The layer of indirection provided by virtual addressing allows the operating system to use other data stores, like a hard drive, to store what would otherwise have to remain in main memory . As a result, operating systems can allow programs to use ...