Engineering / advanced
Virtual memory and physical pressure
Trace address translation, faults, reclamation, and locality while distinguishing process address space from committed physical memory.
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Inside this module
Module 01 advanced
Virtual memory and physical pressure
Trace address translation, faults, reclamation, and locality while distinguishing process address space from committed physical memory.
- 01
Page tables and address translation
Split virtual addresses into page numbers and offsets, then distinguish hardware translation work from operating-system fault handling.
23 min - 02
Demand paging and fault handling
Follow a valid access through lazy allocation, distinguish minor and major faults, and measure first-touch cost separately from steady state.
23 min - 03
Copy-on-write and fork
Explain how private memory can share physical pages after fork, and budget the copies created by later writes.
23 min - 04
Memory-mapped file semantics
Separate mapping visibility, synchronization, file extent, and durability when ordinary loads and stores access file-backed data.
23 min - 05
Page replacement and working sets
Use reference traces, reuse distance, and working-set windows to explain why a resident footprint can be too large or too small for a workload.
23 min - 06
Swap and memory reclamation
Follow clean discard, dirty writeback, anonymous swapping, and direct reclaim while measuring whether reclamation actually helps useful work.
23 min - 07
Huge pages and fragmentation
Compare translation reach with allocation granularity, and distinguish virtual contiguity from the physical layout needed for large mappings.
23 min - 08
Memory overcommit and exhaustion
Separate virtual reservations, commit accounting, physical availability, and cgroup limits when planning allocation failure and recovery.
23 min - 09
Page pinning and direct memory access
Connect device-visible addresses, buffer lifetime, cache synchronization, and page pins without confusing CPU pointers with DMA addresses.
23 min - 10
Memory-pressure diagnosis
Build a falsifiable investigation from memory accounting, faults, reclaim, cgroup events, and user-visible progress rather than one alarming counter.
23 min