Solaris™ Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture, Second Edition

11. Kernel Memory

In the last chapter, we looked mostly at process address space and process memory, but the kernel also needs memory to run the operating system. Kernel memory is required for the kernel text, kernel data, and kernel data structures. In this chapter, we look at what kernel memory is used for, what the kernel virtual address space looks like, and how kernel memory is allocated and managed.

11.1 Kernel Virtual Memory Layout

The kernel, just like a process, uses virtual memory and uses the memory management unit (MMU) to translate its virtual memory addresses into physical pages. The kernel has its own address space and corresponding virtual memory layout. The kernel’s address space is constructed of address space segments, using ...