Part 3 · Lesson 13 · Advanced

Virtual Memory

Every process thinks it owns all the RAM.

In this interactive Linux lesson from Stencel Academy you don't just read — you type real commands like ./a, ./b and watch the machine respond on a live, animated map. It is part of the free How Linux Works course.

Key takeaway: Each process gets its own private virtual address space; page tables translate it to real RAM.

Before this lesson

Builds on: Inside the Kernel.

What you'll practise

free -h — How much physical RAM is actually in use.
cat /proc/self/maps — Your process's virtual address map.
vmstat 1 — Watch paging between RAM and disk.

Terms you'll learn

virtual memorypage tablephysical frametranslationMMU

Check your understanding

Both processes read address 0x1000 — do they share that memory?

No — each maps to a different physical frame
Yes — same address means same memory
Only if they are parent and child

Open the interactive lesson →