Linux Kernel Development, Second Edition

Chapter 14. The Process Address Space

Chapter 11, “Memory Management,” looked at how the kernel manages physical memory. In addition to managing its own memory, the kernel also has to manage the process address space—the representation of memory given to each user-space process on the system. Linux is a virtual memory operating system, and thus the resource of memory is virtualized among the processes on the system. To an individual process, the view is as if it alone has full access to the system's physical memory. More importantly, the address space of even a single process can be much larger than physical memory. This chapter discusses how the kernel manages the process address space.

The process address space consists of the linear address ...