The operating system runs on physical memory and provides an individual, virtual address space to each process, for storing data. To make the transfer between virtual and physical memory easier.
The operating system divides the part of the memory, it doesn't need for its own purpose, into pages. So the virtual address space, a process interacts with, is a multiple of these pages.
Why isn't this true? Why isn't the actual memory consumption (as shown on my top) a multiple,
PID VIRT TIME+ COMMAND 986 212076 11:22.29 Xorg 1194 504916 1:56.15 pulseaudio 1252 445884 0:13.69 xfce4-terminal 827 4256 0:08.16 acpid of the pagesize, my operating system uses?
acpid uses 4256 bytes of Virtual memory. getconf PAGESIZE shows that my system uses a page size of 4096 bytes (4KiB)
