What Makes It Page?: The Windows 7 (x64) Virtual Memory Manager

What Makes It Page?: The Windows 7 (x64) Virtual Memory Manager

This is a book for curious people. It attempts to answer the basic question “how does it work?” As such, it does not explain how to call documented APIs and DDIs to accomplish some specific goal. There is plenty of information available on these subjects, including the MSDN Library, the WDK documentation and several excellent books. Rather, its purpose is to analyze how the Virtual Memory Manager works, simply because it is something worth knowing. With a certain mindset, it might even be something fun to know. Even though this book gives a fairly detailed description of the Virtual Memory Manager, it is not reserved for experienced kernel level programmers. Parts I and II provide information on the x64 processor and enough details on kernel mode code execution to help readers approaching these subjects for the first time. This book describes the Windows 7 x64 implementation of the Virtual Memory Manager. All of the analysis and experiments have been performed on this particular version only.