[keeperofdakeys]

Here are some other great resources on understanding how the OS (in this case linux) manages the memory, and how the hardware works.

http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

[f3r3nc]

The LWN article is from What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory: http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/cpumemory.pdf also discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511990