Memory protection

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Memory protection is a system that prevents one process from corrupting the memory of another process running on the same computer at the same time. It usually employs hardware (i.e. a memory management unit) and system software to allocate distinct memory to different processes and to handle exceptions arising when a process tries to access memory outside its bounds.

There are different ways to achieve memory protection. These include:

Segmentation

Segmentation means that the currently running process is restricted to using only certain parts of memory called segments. A segment is defined by a pair of hardware registers which give the limits of allowed memory addresses. If the data that is about to be read, or written to, is outside the permitted address space of that process, a general protection fault will occur. (This should not be confused with the x86-processors realmode segmentation.)

Paging

Paging is the method mostly used for memory protection. In paging, the memory address space is divided into small pieces, called pages. Using a virtual memory mechanism, each page can be made to reside in any location of the physical memory, or be flagged as being protected. Paging makes it possible to have a linear virtual memory address space access pieces out of a fragmented physical memory space.

Each process is given a page table to define the valid addresses and map them to physical memory. The page table is usually invisible to the process. Page tables make it easy to allocate new memory for a process, as the each new page can be allocated from anywhere in physical memory.

Parts of an application's memory can be "swapped out" to other forms of storage. This happens to memory that is seldom used, and it allows the application to act as if it has a much larger working memory than actually exists. By swapping out memory, the virtual memory layout will not change, but it frees a lot of physical memory (i.e. RAM) for other uses.

If the process is accessing a virtual memory location that is not mapped by the page table, a page fault will occur. Page faults could mean either that the process has tried to access memory that it should not have access to, or that part of the application's memory has been swapped out. In the last case, the page will be swapped back in and execution will proceed where it was interrupted.

Protection Keys

A protection key mechanism divides physical memory up into blocks of a particular size (e.g. 2KB), each of which has an associated numerical value called a protection key. Each process also has a protection key value associated with it. On a memory access the hardware checks that the current process's protection key matches the value associated with the memory block being accessed; if not, an exception occurs. This mechanism was used in the System/360 architecture.

If both paging and segmentation are used at the same time, as in the IA-32 architecture, paging does not map into physical memory at once, but goes through a linear memory stage first. Linear memory is the memory as seen solely by the processors segmentation circuitry, or as if the pages were turned off but the segmentation was still active.

It is important to note that virtual memory is not the same as RAM, that linear memory is a hardware register-defined part of the RAM and that physical memory more or less is the equivalent of RAM. Physical memory is actually both RAM and memory mapped I/O-ports.de:Speicherschutz it:Protezione della memoria ja:メモリ保護機能