9. Virtual Memory

In this section we take a tour through the implementation of the virtual memory layer of Solaris—the virtual address management, anonymous memory, and swap layers are covered.

9.1. Design Overview

Early SunOS versions (SunOS 3 and earlier) were based on the old BSD-style memory system, which was not modularized, and thus it was difficult to move the memory system to different platforms. The virtual memory system was completely redesigned at that time, with the new memory system targeted at SunOS 4.0. The new SunOS 4.0 virtual memory system was built with the following goals in mind:

  • Use of a new object-oriented memory management framework
  • Support for shared and private memory (copy-on-write)
  • Page-based virtual memory management ...

Get Solaris™ Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial