From Virtual to Physical In the previous article , we introduced a way to classify the memory a process reclaimed. We used 4 quadrants using two axis: private/shared and anonymous/file-backed. We also evoked the complexity of the sharing mechanism and the fact that all memory is basically reclaimed to the kernel. Everything we talked about was virtual. It was all about reservation of memory addresses, but a reserved address is not always immediately mapped to physical memory by the kernel.