While I don't have the exact details of PAE, in general memory mapping works by mapping physical memory outside of the normal addressing range, to an address within that range. This means that only a portion of that physical address range can be visible at a given time. An application has to be able to tell the operating system what portion of the physical memory it wants and also where in address space it wants it to be located. The way an application works in Linux is that it is layed out into a 32-bit or 64-bit virtual environment. In general, an application consists of 3 major sections: Text - these are the instructions Data - Initialized data BSS - Unititialized data. Everything is mapped into a virtual address space. Additionally, shared
On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:40:16 -0400
James Knott