Principles of Computer System Design

5.3. Enforcing Modularity in Memory

The implementation of bounded buffers took advantage of the fact that all threads share the same physical memory (see Figure 5.4 on page 209), but sharing memory does not enforce modularity well. A program may calculate a shared address incorrectly and write to a memory location that logically belongs to another module. To enforce modularity, we must ensure that the threads of one module cannot overwrite the data of another module. This section introduces domains and a memory manager to enforce memory boundaries, assuming that the address space is very large (i.e., so large that we can consider it unlimited). In Section 5.4, we will remove that assumption.

5.3.1. Enforcing Modularity with Domains

To contain ...