Mastering Rust - Second Edition

How do programs use memory?

So, we know that a process has a chunk of memory dedicated for its execution. But, how does it access this memory to perform its task? For security purposes and fault isolation, a process is not allowed to access the physical memory directly. Instead, it uses a virtual memory, which is mapped to the actual physical memory by the OS using an in-memory data structure called pages, which are maintained in page tables. The process has to request memory from the OS for its use, and what it gets is a virtual address that is internally mapped to a physical address in the RAM. For performance reasons, this memory is requested and processed in chunks. When virtual memory is accessed by the process, the memory management ...