Wednesday 13 November 2013

Windows Kernel Memory Usage on a 32-bit Vista box vs. 64-bit Windows 7 box

In the 32-bit world, address space discipline is paramount. Vista dedicates 2GB of RAM to the Windows kernel, or fifty percent of the total virtual address space given to a 32 bit program (owing to pointers' addressing constraints). The other half is used by the thread currently running on the CPU. In the 64 bit world, kernel implementers can play more fast and loose with memory.

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