Inside Macintosh: Memory /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Memory, describes the parts of the Macintosh Operating System that allow you to allocate memory directly, release it, or otherwise manipulate it. The book includes introductory material about managing memory on Macintosh computers as well as a complete technical reference to the Memory Manager, the Virtual Memory Manager, and other memory-related services provided by the system software.

If you are new to programming on the Macintosh Operating System, you should begin with the chapter "Introduction to Memory Management." This chapter provides a general introduction to memory management on Macintosh computers. It describes how the Operating System organizes and manages the available memory, and it shows how you can use the services provided by the Memory Manager and other system software components to manage the memory in your application partition effectively. Because this chapter is designed to be largely self-contained, the reference and summary sections in this chapter are subsets of the corresponding sections from the other chapters in this book.

Once you are familiar with basic memory management on Macintosh computers, you should look at the chapter "Memory Manager." It describes how to allocate memory outside your application partition and how to perform more advanced memory operations than are described in the introductory chapter.

The chapter "Virtual Memory Manager" describes the operation of virtual memory and describes the routines that you can use to intervene in the otherwise automatic operations of the Virtual Memory Manager. Most applications are not affected by the operation of virtual memory and do not need to use the routines provided by the Virtual Memory Manager. If your application sends memory addresses to some NuBus\xC5 master hardware, however, you should read the discussion of mapping virtual to physical addresses in that chapter.

The final chapter in this book, "Memory Management Utilities," describes a number of utility routines provided by the system software. You need to read this chapter primarily if you install routines that are executed by system software routines or in response to an interrupt, or if you need to change
the addressing mode. You also need to read this chapter if your application might be affected by the normal operation of the processor's instruction or data caches.

---

Preface Contents

Format of a Typical Chapter

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Assembly-Language Information

Development Environment