The Address Space
Explore the concept of address space as the operating system's abstraction of memory for running programs. Understand how code, stack, and heap are organized within this space, and learn how the OS virtualizes memory to provide each process with a private view of a large addressable memory, despite physical memory sharing.
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However, we have to keep those pesky users in mind, and doing so requires the OS to create an easy to use abstraction of physical memory. We call this abstraction the address space, and it is the running program’s view of memory in the system. Understanding this fundamental OS abstraction of memory is key to understanding how memory is virtualized.
Address space of a process
The address space of a process contains all of the memory state of the running program. For example, the code of the program (the instructions) have to live in memory somewhere, and thus they are in the address space. The program, while it is running, uses a stack to keep track of where it is in the function call chain as well as to allocate local variables and pass parameters and return ...