This is Part 2 of how memory is allocated by the OS. In the first part, I talked about the need for virtual pages and why I called it the "Page-Based Solution." Here, we will talk about how that approach creates its own set of new problems, and how the solutions keep popping up like the heads of a Hydra. Aligning Memory Let’s talk about memory alignment. On a modern 64-bit architecture, the CPU reads data from RAM in 8-byte chunks (called "words"). If our memory isn't aligned, sa...