"Teaching Demo: Introduction to Virtual Memory"

Abstract: 

This will be a short version of a lecture from CMU's course 15-213, Introduction to Computer Systems. In that class it is presented halfway through the term, after students have learned the basics of assembly language and the internals of malloc().

Up till now, we have been studying the details of how the computer executes one compiled program, and we have observed that a program's code and data are always loaded at the same addresses in memory each time it is run. But we know that the computer can run many programs at the same time. How can these two things be true simultaneously? In today's class, we will learn about the mechanism that makes this possible -- _virtual memory_ -- and explore some of its other uses and consequences.

Bio:

Dr. Zachary Weinberg studies and teaches systems involving both computers and people.

I received my PhD from Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2018, and for the past two years I have been teaching CMU's sophomore-level "introduction to computer systems" course. My interests include both pure CS (particularly, the ergonomics of programming languages), CS education (particularly, demystifying the machine, and making programming available as a tool for anyone who needs it), and the sociology and politics of online life. Most of my published research focuses on government censorship of the Internet and closely related topics.

Prior to my time in academia, I worked for the Mozilla Corporation (improving web page rendering in Firefox) and CodeSourcery LLC (customizing GCC's code generation "back end" for various clients).

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