Some notes on Microsoft Windows Memory Management (limited to 32 bit OS)
- Maximum memory available is 4G (because Microsoft is dumb enough to ignore segment registers. See http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproperf/thread/9feee84c-44f8-48fa-b49f-9199473e3006)
- 32 bit applications can access up to 4G of memory but in actual fact it can only access 2 G, which is known as the user mode virtual address space (user space)
- User mode address space range from 0000 0000 - 7FFF FFFF
- The other 2G of memory is known as kernel mode address space (system space) and it is reserved for the OS
- Kernel mode address space range from 8000 0000 - FFFF FFFF
- System space contain the global OS code and data structures that are visible to each process
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