18 docs tagged with "memory-management"

The Virtual Address Space described the layout a process's pointers

Every allocation decision in the kernel eventually comes down to one distinction: physically

The Page Fault Handler named doanonymouspage() and dowppage() as

struct page describes one 4 KiB frame of physical memory, and there is one struct page for every

A TLB holds a fixed number of entries, and its reach — the amount of address space it can translate

Node-local allocation by default, the policies that override it, and when NUMA effects are a red herring.

Translation is a size problem before it's anything else. A flat table mapping every 4 KiB page of a

The Page Allocator hands out pages until it can't. A system that only

The Page Allocator deals in 4 KiB units. The kernel allocates `struct

Swap has an undeserved reputation. It is not "what happens when a machine runs out of memory" — it is

By the time this code runs, every allocation path has already failed, reclaim has already been asked and

Every other allocator in the kernel — slab, vmalloc, the page cache, the stack allocator — ultimately

This is the single most consequential piece of Linux memory management, and the one most misread by

The Life of a Page Fault told this story shallowly, as

Page Tables and the Walk established that a translation costs up to

A pointer on x86-64 is a 64-bit value, but the address space it names is not a 64-bit space. Implementing

How to actually answer "how much memory is this using", and why every simple answer to that question is wrong.

There is a gap between "the write returned" and "the data is safe", and most data-loss incidents live