Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

Services the Memory Manager Provides

The memory manager provides a set of system services to allocate and free virtual memory, share memory between processes, map files into memory, flush virtual pages to disk, retrieve information about a range of virtual pages, change the protection of virtual pages, and lock the virtual pages into memory.

Like other Windows executive services, the memory management services allow their caller to supply a process handle, indicating the particular process whose virtual memory is to be manipulated. The caller can thus manipulate either its own memory or (with the proper permissions) the memory of another process. For example, if a process creates a child process, by default it has the right to manipulate the child ...