Description
Microprocessors - Architectures and performances

General-purpose microprocessors feature hardware support for operating systems, including virtual memory management and memory protection mechanisms. On general-purpose microprocessors, the operating system must allow several processes to be memory-resident simultaneously. To enable these processes to cohabit and share data, a virtual memory mechanism is implemented. These microprocessors use either a linear virtual address space, or a segmented address space. Segmentation-type address space structuring is independent of the notion of virtual memory. Virtual memory can be implemented in various ways. The most widespread solution presented here is based on the paging mechanism.

In this section, we describe the different approaches...