Computer Systems a Programmer s Perspective
1. Basics
- Main Memory: a temporary storage device that holds the data of a program. It's a collection of DRAM chips
CPUs
- Composed or Arithmetic Logic Units and registers
- CPUs run processes concurrently by saving and restoring context via context switching
- This is managed by the system kernel which always resides in memory
Virtual Memory
- Main memory is segmented such that independent processes have their own isolated memory
Kernel
- Manages processes
- Allocates memory
- Performs sys calls
2. Information Storage
Hex
A - 1010 C - 1100 F - 1111
Binary
For powers of 2, i.e. x = 2n, the binary of x is just 1 followed by n zeros