Virtual Memory

A complete overview of the Solaris virtual memory system is beyond the scope of this book, but two virtual memory terms of special importance are used when discussing device drivers: virtual address and address space.

• Virtual address. A virtual address is an address that is mapped by the memory management unit (MMU) to a physical hardware address. All addresses directly accessible by the driver are kernel virtual addresses. Kernel virtual addresses refer to the kernel address space.

• Address space. An address space is a set of virtual address segments. Each segment is a contiguous range of virtual addresses. Each user process has an address space called the user address space. The kernel has its own address space, called the kernel address space.