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mmap. In computing, mmap(2) is a POSIX -compliant Unix system call that maps files or devices into memory. It is a method of memory-mapped file I/O. It implements demand paging because file contents are not immediately read from disk and initially use no physical RAM at all. The actual reads from disk are performed after a specific location is ...
Memory-mapped I/O is preferred in x86-32 and x86-64 based architectures because the instructions that perform port-based I/O are limited to one register: EAX, AX, and AL are the only registers that data can be moved into or out of, and either a byte-sized immediate value in the instruction or a value in register DX determines which port is the source or destination port of the transfer.
A memory-mapped file is a segment of virtual memory [1] that has been assigned a direct byte-for-byte correlation with some portion of a file or file-like resource. This resource is typically a file that is physically present on disk, but can also be a device, shared memory object, or other resource that an operating system can reference through a file descriptor.
In computing, an input–output memory management unit ( IOMMU) is a memory management unit (MMU) connecting a direct-memory-access –capable (DMA-capable) I/O bus to the main memory. Like a traditional MMU, which translates CPU -visible virtual addresses to physical addresses, the IOMMU maps device-visible virtual addresses (also called ...
PCI devices have a set of registers referred to as configuration space and PCI Express introduces extended configuration space for devices. Configuration space registers are mapped to memory locations. Device drivers and diagnostic software must have access to the configuration space, and operating systems typically use APIs to allow access to ...
POSIX also provides the mmap API for mapping files into memory; a mapping can be shared, allowing the file's contents to be used as shared memory. Linux distributions based on the 2.6 kernel and later offer /dev/shm as shared memory in the form of a RAM disk , more specifically as a world-writable directory (a directory in which every user of ...
In computing, a segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) or access violation is a fault, or failure condition, raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system (OS) the software has attempted to access a restricted area of memory (a memory access violation). On standard x86 computers, this is a form of general ...
A page table is a data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer to store mappings between virtual addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are used by the program executed by the accessing process, while physical addresses are used by the hardware, or more specifically, by the random-access memory (RAM) subsystem.