Unfortunately, the term virtual memory (VM) is often misunderstood or hazily understood, at best, by a large proportion of engineers. In this section, we attempt to clarify what this term and its associated terminologies (such as memory pyramid, addressing, and paging) really mean; it's important for developers to clearly understand this key area.
First, what is a process?
A process is an instance of a program in execution.
A program is a binary executable file: a dead, disk object. For example, take the cat program:$ ls -l /bin/cat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36784 Nov 10 23:26 /bin/cat
$
When we run cat it becomes a live runtime schedulable entity, which, in the Unix universe, we call a process.
In order to understand deeper ...
