Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

5.3. The address space of a process

When accessing memory, a process is said to operate within an address space, meaning the association between the range of addresses available to the process and the data items that are accessible at those addresses. We make use of this concept throughout the book. It is important for naming (addressing), protection and system structure and we need to examine it in some detail.

In a RISC-style processor, only certain machine language instructions contain addresses, for example:

LOAD a specified processor register with the contents of an address;

STORE the contents of a processor register at an address;

CALL a procedure at some address;

JUMP or BRANCH to an address.

The instructions have an address field which contains ...