The Old New Thing

Attention all humorless technaheads

Raymond ChenJuly 4, 2016Jul 4, 201607/4/16

My colleagues over on the MSDN side of the company tell me that the feedback on MSDN Library and Dev Center generally fall into four categories: My laptop crashed. Windows sucks! Microsoft sucks! Can you fix my code? Check out this male enhancement product. And then this happens. Feedback submitted on 03/25/2015 for Create Personality YADA

How exactly are page tables allocated on demand for large reserved regions?

Raymond ChenJuly 1, 2016Jul 1, 201607/1/16

Commenter pm100 asked to go into more detail into why reserving a large amount of address space used to be expensive, and now it's not. I sort of answered it in my reply, but let's draw some pictures. Recall that the paging structure is hierarchical. To describe a page of memory, you first select a page directory pointer from the page direct