Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 2

There is a systemwide limit, called the system commit limit or simply the commit limit, on the amount of committed virtual memory that can exist at any one time. This limit corresponds to the current total size of all paging files, plus the amount of RAM that is usable by the operating system. This is the second of the two numbers displayed as Commit on Task Manager’s Performance tab. The memory manager can increase the commit limit automatically by expanding one or more of the paging files, if they are not already at their configured maximum size.

Commit charge and the system commit limit will be explained in more detail in a later section.

Locking Memory

In general, it’s better to let the memory manager decide which pages remain in physical memory. However, there might be special circumstances where it might be necessary for an application or device driver to lock pages in physical memory. Pages can be locked in memory in two ways:

Windows applications can call the VirtualLock function to lock pages in their process working set. Pages locked using this mechanism remain in memory until explicitly unlocked or until the process that locked them terminates. The number of pages a process can lock can’t exceed its minimum working set size minus eight pages. Therefore, if a process needs to lock more pages, it can increase its working set minimum with the SetProcessWorkingSetSizeEx function (referred to in the section Working Set Management).

Device drivers can call the kernel-mode functions MmProbeAndLockPages, MmLockPagableCodeSection, MmLockPagableDataSection, or MmLockPagableSectionByHandle. Pages locked using this mechanism remain in memory until explicitly unlocked. The last three of these APIs enforce no quota on the number of pages that can be locked in memory because the resident available page charge is obtained when the driver first loads; this ensures that it can never cause a system crash due to overlocking. For the first API, quota charges must be obtained or the API will return a failure status.

Allocation Granularity

Windows aligns each region of reserved process address space to begin on an integral boundary defined by the value of the system allocation granularity, which can be retrieved from the Windows GetSystemInfo or GetNativeSystemInfo function. This value is 64 KB, a granularity that is used by the memory manager to efficiently allocate metadata (for example, VADs, bitmaps, and so on) to support various process operations. In addition, if support were added for future processors with larger page sizes (for example, up to 64 KB) or virtually indexed caches that require systemwide physical-to-virtual page alignment, the risk of requiring changes to applications that made assumptions about allocation alignment would be reduced.

Note

Windows kernel-mode code isn’t subject to the same restrictions; it can reserve memory on a single-page granularity (although this is not exposed to device drivers for the reasons detailed earlier). This level of granularity is primarily used to pack TEB allocations more densely, and because this mechanism is internal only, this code can easily be changed if a future platform requires different values. Also, for the purposes of supporting 16-bit and MS-DOS applications on x86 systems only, the memory manager provides the MEM_DOS_LIM flag to the MapViewOfFileEx API, which is used to force the use of single-page granularity.

Finally, when a region of address space is reserved, Windows ensures that the size and base of the region is a multiple of the system page size, whatever that might be. For example, because x86 systems use 4-KB pages, if you tried to reserve a region of memory 18 KB in size, the actual amount reserved on an x86 system would be 20 KB. If you specified a base address of 3 KB for an 18-KB region, the actual amount reserved would be 24 KB. Note that the VAD for the allocation would then also be rounded to 64-KB alignment/length, thus making the remainder of it inaccessible. (VADs will be described later in this chapter.)

Shared Memory and Mapped Files

As is true with most modern operating systems, Windows provides a mechanism to share memory among processes and the operating system. Shared memory can be defined as memory that is visible to more than one process or that is present in more than one process virtual address space. For example, if two processes use the same DLL, it would make sense to load the referenced code pages for that DLL into physical memory only once and share those pages between all processes that map the DLL, as illustrated in Figure 10-1.