Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Addressing 2 – paging in brief

To address (pun intended) this tricky issue, computer scientists came up with a solution: do not attempt to map individual virtual bytes (or even words) to their physical counterpart; it's far too expensive. Instead, carve up both physical and virtual memory space into blocks and map them.

A bit simplistically, there are broadly two ways to do this:

• Hardware-segmentation
• Hardware-paging

Hardware-segmentation: Carves up the virtual and physical address space into arbitrary-sized chunks called segments. The best example is Intel 32-bit processors.

Hardware-paging: Carves up the virtual and physical address space into equal-sized chunks called pages. Most real-world processors support hardware-paging, including ...