Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By : CH Raghav Maruthi
Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By: CH Raghav Maruthi

Overview of this book

Mastering Linux Kernel Development looks at the Linux kernel, its internal arrangement and design, and various core subsystems, helping you to gain significant understanding of this open source marvel. You will look at how the Linux kernel, which possesses a kind of collective intelligence thanks to its scores of contributors, remains so elegant owing to its great design. This book also looks at all the key kernel code, core data structures, functions, and macros, giving you a comprehensive foundation of the implementation details of the kernel’s core services and mechanisms. You will also look at the Linux kernel as well-designed software, which gives us insights into software design in general that are easily scalable yet fundamentally strong and safe. By the end of this book, you will have considerable understanding of and appreciation for the Linux kernel.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Virtual Memory Management

In the first chapter, we had brief discussion about an important abstraction called a process. We had discussed the process virtual address space and its isolation, and also have traversed thorough the memory management subsystem and gained a thorough understanding of various data structures and algorithms that go into physical memory management. In this chapter, let's extend our discussion on memory management with details of virtual memory management and page tables. We will look into the following aspects of the virtual memory subsystem:

  • Process virtual address space and its segments
  • Memory descriptor structure
  • Memory mapping and VMA objects
  • File-backed memory mappings
  • Page cache
  • Address translation with page tables