Re: [Q] Question about memory access

From: Gianni Tedesco (gianni@scaramanga.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 04:35:25 EST


On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 08:14, Cho, joon-woo wrote:
> If someone want to transfer large data from some device to memory, he may
> use DMA method.
>
> At this point, i am confused.
>
> I think that only one process can access physical memory(RAM) at a time.

The DMA controller is a dedicated piece of hardware that copies the data
from devices to RAM. This means that other processes can use the CPU
while the DMA is in progress. That is the whole point of DMA.

-- 
// Gianni Tedesco (gianni at scaramanga dot co dot uk)
lynx --source www.scaramanga.co.uk/gianni-at-ecsc.asc | gpg --import
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