From the course: Linux Device Drivers

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Understand the user and kernel address spaces

Understand the user and kernel address spaces - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Device Drivers

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Understand the user and kernel address spaces

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- [Instructor] Let's talk about address spaces, in particular user space versus kernel space. And one can think of user space only gets a little window into the kernel through the system call mechanism. I want to talk about kernel versus user, what it means to be kernel mode, we're going to look a little more carefully at the functions for copying data back and forth between the kernel and user space. And then we're going to talk about the issues of why you want to use those the functions, what can go wrong. So you want to keep in mind that both the kernel and processes use virtual addresses. The variables and functions and so forth in a kernel have virtual address just like they do in user space. That means the addresses are translated to a physical address. Now device drivers sometimes have to use physical addresses, but that's, you know, special uses of addresses for DMA or something like that. So the kernel…

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