A mass-storage medium, such as a disk, that serves as backup “memory” for paging when physical memory becomes full. See also paging file.
The set of processes currently in the system, in particular, processes whose threads are eligible for execution. See also dispatch state and working set.
Any process is either part of the balance set (“included”) or not (“excluded”). A kernel-mode process must remain in the balance set as long as any of its threads owns a mutex object. Each thread owning one or more mutexes continues to run until it releases its last mutex, when the thread is suspended. The process is not removed from the balance set until every thread has released all mutexes.
At any given moment, the balance set depends on the availability of physical memory (pages) to back the virtual address space associated with each active process. If a physical memory shortage occurs, the NT Memory Manager first trims the working set of each active process to its minimum, then (if necessary) removes processes from the balance set.
A section allocated at the same virtual address for each process that has a view of the section. See also section and view.
Buffer control block
An opaque Cache Manager structure, used to maintain state as a file system pins and releases data (for example, its volume structure) in the cache.
Refers to a processor memory architecture in which the byte layout is as follows:
·Byte N is the most significant (and, in conventional layout diagrams, the “leftmost”) byte of:
·A word composed of bytes N and (N + 1).
·A double word composed of bytes N, (N + 1), (N + 2), and (N + 3).
·A K-byte memory entity composed of bytes N, (N + 1),...,(N + K – 1).
The address of the preceding word, double word, or K-byte entity is its most significant byte, N.
Some RISC machines can be configured for either big-endian or little-endian byte addressing. For a big-endian configuration, the most significant bit of a 16-bit short value is the “leftmost” bit at byte N, while the least significant bit is the “rightmost” bit of byte (N + 1). See also little-endian.
The terms “big-endian” and “little-endian” are derived from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.