Windows Internals, Part 1: System architecture, processes, threads, memory management, and more, Seventh Edition

Dynamic system virtual address space management

Thirty-two–bit versions of Windows manage the system address space through an internal kernel virtual allocator mechanism, described in this section. Currently, 64-bit versions of Windows have no need to use the allocator for virtual address space management (and thus bypass the cost) because each region is statically defined (refer to Figure 5-13).

When the system initializes, the MiInitializeDynamicVa function sets up the basic dynamic ranges and sets the available virtual address to all available kernel space. It then initializes the address space ranges for boot loader images, process space (hyperspace), and the HAL through the MiInitialize-SystemVaRange function, which is used to set hard-coded ...