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

Chapter 5. Memory management

In this chapter, you’ll learn how Windows implements virtual memory and how it manages the subset of virtual memory kept in physical memory. We’ll also describe the internal structure and components that make up the memory manager, including key data structures and algorithms. Before examining these mechanisms, we’ll review the basic services provided by the memory manager and key concepts such as reserved memory versus committed memory and shared memory.

Introduction to the memory manager

By default, the virtual size of a process on 32-bit Windows is 2 GB. If the image is marked specifically as large address space–aware, and the system is booted with a special option (described in the section “x86 address space ...