Is possible to allocate strictly physical mem.(RAM) instead of virtual (page file)

[marcelse]

Purpose is to develop secure application, which will store sensitive data only in RAM, preventing sensitive data to be written on hard drive. Turning off the computer will erase data stored in RAM. THANKS A LOT

marcelse

[John R Shaw]

I do not know about managed code, but in unmanaged code ‘new’ and ‘malloc’ would not normally allocate virtual memory, although that may have changed. Dig through the docs and code to find out.

INTP "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence."Edsger Dijkstra

[marcelse]

Thanks for your reply John, I have read a lot of documentation, but only info I got is that operation system will decide what memmory will give to application, physical or virtual, but I have to be 100% sure that sensitive data were not written on HDD.

marcelse

[John R Shaw]

All I know is that ‘malloc’ use to only allocate memory from the heap and MS’s older version of ‘new’ use to get the actual memory by calling ‘malloc’ before calling the C++ constructor. MS’s newest OS may not work that way any more, but testing it by allocating really huge amounts of memory may give you the answer. May be you should check if ‘Jeffrey Rickter’ has written a new book that covers that, or may be one of his articles in MSJ mag. Good Luck! (There seem to be some network problems – I tried to post this 3 times, so far)

INTP "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence."Edsger Dijkstra

[Russell]

I think that you can't be sure of that: it is the operating system that decide to store temporary part of the virtual memory on the HDD to free some resources. Probally you can't bypass that mechanism, I don't know any function to mark the pages of memory as "sensitive" and leave they on the RAM. Sorry

Cheers, Russell

[Nemanja Trifunovic]

Look at VirtualLock[^]

---

Programming Blog utf8-cpp

[Stephen Hewitt]

John R. Shaw wrote:

do not know about managed code, but in unmanaged code ‘new’ and ‘malloc’ would not normally allocate virtual memory, although that may have changed. Dig through the docs and code to find out.

new and malloc do allocate virtual memory and have done since memory virtualisation was introduced.

Steve

[sanket patel]

Hello! seach for the concepts like RamFS, RAM disk.... http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

sanket patel

[marcelse]

THANK YOU ALL, FOR YOUR REPLY, I will try to find out more about ramfs,virtuallock, AWE - alocatephysicalpage REGARDS

marcelse

[marcelse]

REPLY TO ALL: Solution is AWE .... Address Windowing Extensions it can allocate physical RAM and then map it to use... not so straightforward but, I hope it will fit my needs.. THANKS

marcelse