Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

Address Translation

Now that you've seen how Windows structures the virtual address space, let's look at how it maps these address spaces to real physical pages. User applications and system code reference virtual addresses. This section starts with a detailed description of 32-bit x86 address translation, followed by a brief description of the differences on the 64-bit IA-64 and x64 platform. In the next section, we'll describe what happens when such a translation doesn't resolve to a physical memory address (paging) and explain how Windows manages physical memory via working sets and the page frame database.

x86 Virtual Address Translation

Using data structures the memory manager creates and maintains called page tables, the CPU translates virtual ...