Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
How is the process address space(4GB) allocated between usermode and kernel mode modules in windows
when i checked explorer.exe in process explorer the lower 2GB is occupied by user mode dlls
and upper 3-4GB address range of system process is loaded by drivers (*.sys files)
So my question is will all these 3-4GB address range of each process is shared or they get duplicated for each process?
The upper gigabyte is where the OS kernel lives, as well as all the drivers and additional modules, as well as I/O buffers and other kernel-only data memory. That are is shared by all processes, and indeed has to be for the kernel to work at all. The page tables live in a region called hyperspace which is at the 3 GB boundary and is the only section of memory above 2 GB that is not shared between processes. The 3rd gigabyte is used by the kernel by default, but if you build your programs to have 3GB of usermode memory, then this area will belong to the process.
That’s all off the top of my head, so feel free to correct me.