← OS & ArchitectureOS & ARCHITECTURE 3.2

Virtual Memory & Caches

Not started yet — pages, page tables, the TLB, and the page-fault path, then what that means for a real process's memory map, then the cache hierarchy underneath all of it. The biggest topic in Phase 3 at 17 bytes across 3 chapters.

Planned chapters

A — Virtual Memory Machinery. Why virtual memory exists, pages and frames, multi-level page tables, the TLB, the MMU, the full page-fault flow, demand paging and swap, and a by-hand virtual-to-physical address translation.
B — Userspace Memory Reality. Reading a process's real memory map in /proc/PID/maps, malloc internals (brk vs. mmap), stack mechanics and stack overflow, and mmap itself.
C — Caches. The L1/L2/L3 hierarchy, cache lines and locality, write-through vs. write-back, cache coherency (MESI at a story level), and false sharing.

Not yet catalogued — check back once this topic is underway.

Notes from readers

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