Understanding Virtual Memory

I've found the set of short articles on memory here to be excellent:<p><a href="http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/page-cache-the-affair-between-memory-and-files" rel="nofollow">http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/page-cache-the-affair-b...</a>

I love seeing links like this on HN: you can actually learn something, not just read some opinionated article :)

Worth also looking here: <a href="http://www.cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/Workingsets.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/Workingsets.html</a><p>Had the great pleasure of being one of his students years ago during my undergrad. Hands down the best professor I've ever had.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Denning" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Denning</a>

Here are some other great resources on understanding how the OS (in this case linux) manages the memory, and how the hardware works.<p><a href="http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html" rel="nofollow">http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html</a><p><a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/</a>

Makes me wonder how fast OS level garbage collection could be, without the need to have a virtual memory layer in between...