Memory protection

Abstract

Accidental overwriting of files or of memory regions belonging to other programs, browsing of personal files by superusers, Trojan horses, and viruses are examples of breakdowns in workstations and personal computers that would be significantly reduced by memory protection. Memory protection is the capability of an operating system and supporting hardware to delimit segments of memory, to control whether segments can be read from or written into, and to confine accesses of a program to its segments alone. The absence of memory protection in many operating systems today is the result of a bias toward a narrow definition of performance as maximum instruction-execution rate. A broader definition, including the time to get the job done, makes clear that cost of recovery from memory interference errors reduces expected performance. The mechanisms of memory protection are well understood, powerful, efficient, and elegant. They add to performance in the broad sense without reducing instruction execution rate.