Question

OS prevents GDB from giving us the physical address, and instead we have virtual addresses.
Is there a way to actually get that physical address?

Doing debugging on Windows Visual Studio looks more promising: the addresses look more like real addresses. However, are they really the physical addresses???

I have been investigating GDB and Visual Studio with the following source code for a few days already (and you can tell this from my profile)

int main()
{
  int a = 10;
  int b = 13;
  int c;
  c = a + b;
  return 0;

}

PS: I know I have been asking many similar questions. This is a super broad topic, and I thank you all the great helps. JFYI, it is 3:36AM 🙁 and I do a lot of research + testing before I come here to ask.
Thanks.

Answer 1

If you mean the actual address on the physical memory hardware, then there isn’t really such a thing (consider that the OS may decide to swap your page to disk, etc.)

See here: How to translate a virtual memory address to a physical address?