Introduction

Memory management system is, the part of the operating system kernel that manages the Physical memory. Apart from that it also does many things like providing the,

• Physical pages to various layers of the memory management system.
• Contiguous kernel memory using a slab allocator.
• Non-contiguous memory using the vmalloc algorithm
• user-space processes with Virtual memory.

Some knowledge about the ix86 paging mechanism will be helpfull (i think mandatory) to proceed with this document. I have seen a lot of good documents from Intel, that are really usefull. I will try to link them in the bibliography.
It is not necessary to enable paging and segmentation in ix86 architecture. But enabling them provides lot of functionality like segment wise protection and virtual memory. So paging is enabled linux and is done in the early boot process itself.