Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

5.1. Memory management

We first take an architectural view of main memory in the context of the storage hierarchy of a computer, and then go on to study issues such as protection and sharing which are relevant to concurrent systems design. We are concerned with two distinct kinds of memory management: first of all the logical address space that is available to a particular process and then the physical memory or main memory of the machine on which that process is running.

Instructions must be in main memory in order to be fetched and executed by a processor. Any data operand referenced by an instruction must be in main memory for the instructions to execute successfully. Our expectations of what 'a reasonable amount of main memory' is have changed ...