Memory Protection - Memory Protection in Different Operating Systems

Memory Protection in Different Operating Systems

Different operating systems use different forms of memory protection or separation. True memory separation was not used in home computer operating systems until OS/2 was released in 1987. On prior systems, such lack of protection was even used as a form of interprocess communication, by sending a pointer between processes. It is possible for processes to access System Memory in the Windows 9x family of Operating Systems.

Some operating systems that do implement memory protection include:

  • Microsoft Windows family from Windows NT 3.1
  • OS/2
  • OS-9, as an optional module
  • Unix-like systems, including Solaris, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and GNU Hurd
  • Plan9 and Inferno, created at Bell Labs as Unix successors

On Unix-like systems, the mprotect system call is used to control memory protection.

Read more about this topic:  Memory Protection

Famous quotes containing the words memory, protection, operating and/or systems:

    The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.
    Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987)

    We all cry out that the world is corrupt,—and I fear too justly,—but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that it is our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

    I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
    William Burroughs (b. 1914)

    Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)