A look inside Windows Vista's kernel - Part 2

Windows and the applications that run on it have bumped their heads on the address space limits of 32-bit processors. The Windows kernel is constrained by default to 2GB, or half the total 32-bit virtual address space, with the other half reserved for use by the process whose thread is currently running on the CPU. Inside its half, the kernel has to map itself, device drivers, the file system cache, kernel stacks, per-session code data structures, and both non-paged (locked-in physical memory) and paged buffers allocated by device drivers. Prior to Windows Vista, the Memory Manager determined at boot time how much of the address space to assign to these different purposes, but this inflexibility sometimes led to situations where one of the regions became full while others still had plenty of available space. The exhaustion of an area can lead to application failures and prevent device drivers from completing I/O operations.