Address Windowing Extensions

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) is a

paging
.

The application reserves a region, or "window" of virtual address space, and allocates one or more regions of physical memory. Using the AWE API, the application can map the virtual window to any one of the physical regions. The application can reserve more than one virtual address space and map it to any of the allocated regions of physical memory, as long as the number of bytes reserved in the virtual address space matches that of the physical memory region. An application must have the Lock Pages in Memory privilege to use AWE.

On 32-bit systems, AWE depends on

PSE36 method (from the Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition) of accessing more than 4 GB of memory, which was no longer supported in Windows 2000.[3][4] Among the first applications to make use of AWE were Oracle 8.1.6[4] and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.[3]

If the /3GB boot flag is used to repartition the 32-bit virtual address space (from the 2 GB kernel and 2 GB userland) to 3 GB userland, then AWE is limited to accessing 16 GB of physical memory.[3] This limitation is because with only one GB reserved for the kernel, there isn't enough memory for the page table entries to map more than 16 GB of memory.[5] Additional restrictions on the maximum amount of memory addressable thorough AWE are imposed by the Windows licensing scheme. For example, Windows 2000 Advanced Server was limited to 8 GB, while Windows 2000 Data Center Server supported 64 GB.[6]

An article published in

pagefile, and suggested that AWE regions could therefore be used as a way of protecting sensitive application data such as encryption keys.[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Address Windowing Extensions". MSDN. a set of extensions that allows an application to quickly manipulate physical memory greater than 4GB.
  2. ^ "Physical Address Extension". Microsoft. November 6, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-13.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4302-0407-7
    .
  4. ^ a b Michael R. Ault (2003-02-17). "Increasing Available Memory in Linux and Windows" (PDF). ROBO Books White Paper. pp. 10–12. Retrieved 2014-03-01.
  5. ^ Tuning IBM xSeries Servers for Performance (PDF) (3rd ed.). IBM SG24-5287-02. June 2002. pp. 92–93. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-03-03.
  6. ISBN 978-0-13-046388-3
    .
  7. ^ Coombs, Jason (October 18, 2004). "Protecting RAM Secrets with Address Windowing Extensions". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Archived from the original on 18 December 2007. Retrieved 2007-12-08.

External links

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