Since physical memory is allocated and freed on a page granularity,
there is no guarantee that a domain will receive a contiguous stretch
of physical memory. However most operating systems do not have good
support for operating in a fragmented physical address space. To aid
porting such operating systems to run on top of Xen, we make a
distinction between machine memory and pseudo-physical
memory.
Put simply, machine memory refers to the entire amount of memory
installed in the machine, including that reserved by Xen, in use by
various domains, or currently unallocated. We consider machine memory
to comprise a set of 4kB machine page frames numbered
consecutively starting from 0. Machine frame numbers mean the same
within Xen or any domain.
Pseudo-physical memory, on the other hand, is a per-domain
abstraction. It allows a guest operating system to consider its memory
allocation to consist of a contiguous range of physical page frames
starting at physical frame 0, despite the fact that the underlying
machine page frames may be sparsely allocated and in any order.
To achieve this, Xen maintains a globally readable machine-to-physical table which records the mapping from machine
page frames to pseudo-physical ones. In addition, each domain is
supplied with a physical-to-machine table which performs the
inverse mapping. Clearly the machine-to-physical table has size
proportional to the amount of RAM installed in the machine, while each
physical-to-machine table has size proportional to the memory
allocation of the given domain.
Architecture dependent code in guest operating systems can then use
the two tables to provide the abstraction of pseudo-physical memory.
In general, only certain specialized parts of the operating system
(such as page table management) needs to understand the difference
between machine and pseudo-physical addresses.
