Chapter 5. Understanding Xen Memory Management

This chapter will explore how memory is handled by Xen. Memory management is generally very CPU architecture dependent. On x86, the operating system sets up page tables that the CPU’s Memory Management Unit (MMU) walks to handle address translation, whereas something like SPARC handles page tables in software and just expects the operating system to fill and empty the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in response to page faults. Although Xen runs on several non-x86 platforms, this chapter will focus on x86, beginning with an overview of how x86 manages memory in the absence of virtualization.

Much of this chapter is specific to paravirtualized guests. Those running in HVM mode appear to be running ...

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