Loading...
Searching...
No Matches
Memory management - Data Spaces and the Region Map

# User-level paging

Memory management in L4-based systems is done by user-level applications, the role is usually called pager. Tasks can give other tasks full or restricted access rights to parts of their own memory. The kernel offers means to give access to memory in a secure way, often referred to as memory mapping.

The mapping mechanism allows one task to resolve page faults of another: A thread usually has a pager assigned to it. When the thread causes a page fault, the kernel sends an IPC message to the pager with information about the page fault. The pager answers this IPC by either providing a backing page, or with an error. The kernel will map the backing page into the address space of the faulting thread's task.

These mechanisms can be used to construct a memory and paging hierarchy among tasks. The root of the hierarchy is sigma0, which initially gets all system resources and hands them out once on a first-come-first-served basis. Memory resources can be mapped between tasks at a page-size granularity. This size is predetermined by the CPU's memory management unit and is commonly set to 4 kB.

## Data spaces

A data space is the L4Re abstraction for objects which may be accessed in a memory mapped fashion (i.e., using normal memory read and write instructions). Examples include the sections of a binary which the loader attaches to the application's address space, files in the ROM or on disk provided by a file server, the registers of memory-mapped devices and anonymous memory such as the heap or the stack.

Anonymous memory data spaces in particular (but in general all data spaces except memory mapped IO) can either be constructed entirely from a portion of the RAM or the current working set may be multiplexed on some portion of the RAM. In the first case it is possible to eagerly insert all pages (more precisely page-frame capabilities) into the application's address space such that no further page faults occur when this data space is accessed. In general, however, only the pages for some portion are provided and further pages are inserted by the pager as a result of page faults.

## Virtual Memory Handling

The virtual memory of each task is constructed from data spaces backing virtual memory regions (VMRs). The management of the VMRs is provided by an object called region map. A dedicated region-map object is associated with each task; it allows attaching and detaching data spaces to an address space as well as reserving areas of virtual memory. Since the region-map object possesses all knowledge about the virtual memory layout of a task, it also serves as an application's default pager.

## Memory Allocation

Operating systems commonly use anonymous memory for implementing dynamic memory allocation (e.g., using malloc or new). In an L4Re-based system, each task gets assigned a memory allocator providing anonymous memory using data spaces.

See also
  L4Re::Dataspace and L4Re::Rm.