Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I’ll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but without shying away from internals. While the concepts are generic, examples are mostly from Linux and Windows on 32-bit x86. This first post describes how programs are laid out in memory. Each process in a multi-tasking OS runs in its own memory sandbox. This sandbox is the virtual address space, which in 32-bit mode is always a 4GB block of memory addresses.