Solaris™ Internals: Core Kernel Components

5.4. Memory Segments

Another example of the object-oriented approach to memory management is the memory “segment” object. Memory segments manage the mapping of a linear range of virtual memory into an address space. The mapping is between the address space and some type of device. The objective of the memory segment is to allow both memory and devices to be mapped into an address space. Traditionally, this required hard-coding memory and device information into the address space handlers for each device. The object architecture allows different behaviors for different segments.

For example, one segment might be a mapping of a file into an address space (with mmap), and another segment might be the mapping of a hardware device into the process's ...