Virtual Memory - Intro to Paging Tables

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Introduction

Virtual memory is probably one of the most interesting topics of modern computer science. Although virtual memory was originally designed back when physical memory was not an abundant resource to allow the use of disk space as ram, it has stuck with us, offering security, modularity, and flexibility. Unlike the rest of the content on my sites which is bound to an operating system, virtual memory is really a CPU level concept. Although virtual memory is well documented in the intel manual, applying such knowledge to windows can be tricky due to the fact there isn’t a single documented way to interface with paging tables on windows. In this series of write ups I will be discussing methods to manipulate paging tables and detect such manipulations. Although there are many different types of paging table systems, I will only be discussing the standard four layer paging table system used in all modern AMD and Intel 64 bit CPU’s.