Virtual Memory Subsystem in Linux Kernel 2.6 | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
Virtual Memory Subsystem in Linux Kernel 2.6 A.S.Sumant ,P.M.Chawan, January 2010. The 2.6 Linux kernel employs a number of techniques to improve the use of large amounts of memory, making Linux more enterprise-ready than ever before. This article outlines a few of the more important changes, including reverse mapping, the use of larger memory pages, storage of page-table entries in high memory, and greater stability of the memory manager. The memory management subsystem is one of the most important parts of the operating system. Since the early days of computing, there has been a need for more memory than exists physically in a system. Strategies have been developed to overcome this limitation and the most successful of these is virtual memory. Virtual memory makes the system appear to have more memory than it actually has by sharing it between competing processes as they need it. Linux supports virtual memory, that is, using a disk as an extension of RAM so that the effective size of usable memory grows correspondingly. The kernel will write the contents of a currently unused block of memory to the hard disk so that the memory can be used for another purpose. When the original contents are needed again, they are read back into memory. This is all made completely transparent to the user; programs running under Linux only see the larger amount of memory available and don't notice that parts of them reside on the disk from time to time.
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