Coming back to this chapter, we will look at the meaning and purpose of virtual memory (VM) and, importantly, why it is a key concept and required one. We will cover the meaning and importance of VM, paging and address-translation, the benefits of using VM, the memory layout of a process in execution, and the internal layout of a process as seen by the kernel. We shall also delve into what segments make up the process virtual address space. This knowledge is indispensable in difficult-to-debug situations.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Virtual memory
• Process virtual address space