Tag
virtual-memory
- Apr 21, 2026 Heap Growth and Release: brk, mmap, and Trim How a process obtains heap memory from the kernel, why a large allocation bypasses the main heap entirely, and what returning pages actually costs at the page-table level. memory systems
- Oct 17, 2025 mmap and the Page-Fault Path: What a Mapping Really Does A memory mapping installs page-table entries lazily, so the first touch of each page faults into the page cache. The fault path, the shared and private cases, and the failure modes that follow from the split between mapping and page tables. systems programming
- Sep 14, 2025 What Live Memory Acquisition Changes While It Reads Why the act of capturing physical memory alters the state being captured, which artifacts survive the read, and the ordering rules that follow from the perturbation. security
- May 22, 2025 Dynamic Address Translation and the 16 MB Line How a two-level segment and page table turns a 24-bit virtual address into a real one, why the page tables themselves had to live in real storage, and what the 16 MB ceiling forced. computing history
- May 31, 2024 ELF Program Headers and the Mapping a Loader Performs Before _start How PT_LOAD entries describe the bytes the kernel maps, why file offsets and virtual addresses must be congruent modulo the page size, and where the process stack layout comes from. systems programming
- Dec 29, 2023 Sequential Scans, Hardware Prefetch, and the Page Walk What happens between a linear loop over an array and the memory it reads, why huge pages change the cost, and where a scan stops being sequential. data structures