pagealigned

Pagealigned is a term used primarily in computer science and digital computing to describe the positioning of data or memory addresses in relation to page boundaries within a computer's virtual memory system. Memory alignment is a critical factor in optimizing data access speed and ensuring efficient processing by the central processing unit (CPU).

In the context of paging, a memory management scheme, pages are fixed-length blocks of memory used to map virtual addresses to physical addresses. Pagealigned refers to data structures, addresses, or memory blocks that begin exactly at the start of a page boundary, which is a multiple of the page size. This alignment can improve performance because many processors are optimized to access data that is aligned with page boundaries, reducing the need for multiple memory fetches.

Ensuring page alignment involves adjusting memory allocations so that the starting address of data coincides with a page boundary. For example, if the system's page size is 4 KB, a pagealigned data structure's address should be divisible by 4,096.

Pagealigned data and addresses play essential roles in various computing tasks, including memory management, system performance optimization, and security practices such as mitigating certain types of side-channel attacks. Many programming languages and system APIs provide mechanisms to allocate pagealigned memory, often through specific functions or compiler directives.

Overall, pagealignment is a fundamental concept in system architecture that enhances memory access efficiency and system stability, especially in low-level programming, operating systems, and hardware design.

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