Linux Memory Management FAQ

For anybody who&#x27;s interested I also wrote up a whole bunch of notes on this at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lorenzo-stoakes&#x2F;linux-vm-notes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lorenzo-stoakes&#x2F;linux-vm-notes</a> and superceded by far more recent <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lorenzo-stoakes&#x2F;linux-mm-notes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lorenzo-stoakes&#x2F;linux-mm-notes</a><p>I have made a few patches into the mm subsystem some simply inspired by researching for the articles.

&quot;Virtual addresses are the size of a CPU register. On 32 bit systems each process has 4 gigabytes of virtual address space all to itself, which is often more memory than the system actually has.&quot;<p>I guess this is not the most up-to-date document?

The Drepper series of article dates from 2007. Is it still relevant or has anything fundamental changed in memory handling in the last 13 years ?

The times I have had to explain how mm works is draining. yes you can malloc 2M, no that does not mean you have 2M to use.

Much of this applies to other OSes with virtual memory also.