Penguin
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The concept that the memory your program sees, is not the way memory is layed out physically. You may see memory with holes in it, or parts being read only, or execute only, and you probably don't see all of memory. This allows the application to have memory with a consitent, logical layout and leave the OS to worry about implementing it. On Linux it's quite possible for applications to use more memory than the machine has RAM, with parts not in active use being swapped to disk and other parts being mmap(2)'ed to conventional files as well.

See MemoryProtection MemoryMap