Memory Management
Paul Krzyzanowski
last update: March 25, 2012
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 10, “The Captive,” pt. 2, ch. 3
Introduction
One of the most-demanded resources in computers (other than the CPU) is system memory. Every process needs it since a process’ code, stack, heap (dynamically-allocated structures), and data (variables) must all reside in memory. A processor reads instructions from memory and reads/writes data from/to memory. The functional interface of memory is:
value = read(address): read the contents