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
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