Exploring Windows virtual memory management
In a previous post , we discussed the IA-32e 64-bit paging structures, and how they can be used to turn virtual addresses into physical addresses. They're a simple but elegant way to manage virtual address mappings as well as page permissions with varying granularity of page sizes. All of which is provided by the architecture. But as one might expect, once you add an operating system like Windows into the mix, things get a little more interesting. The problem of per-process memory In Windows, a process is nothing more than a simple container of threads and metadata that represents a user-mode application. It has its own memory so that it can manage the different pieces of data and code that make the process do something useful. Let's consider, then, two processes that both try to read and write from the memory located at the virtual address 0x00000000`11223344 . Based on what we know about paging, we expect that the virtual address is going to end up translating into the