System and method for inheriting memory management policies in a data processing systems

摘要

An operating system architecture and method which provides for transparent inheritance of memory management policies in data processing systems and enhanced memory management is disclosed. The operating system provides for a special “debug” process flag to be associated with debug and device management processes. When a source process transmits a message to a destination process, the operating system determines whether the source process is a debug process (i.e., whether the source process contains a debug process flag indicator associated therewith). If the source process is a debug process, a debug process flag indicator is also associated with the destination process. The operating system also reserves a portion of the device's memory (a reserve memory pool) which is only allocated to special “debug” process when the non-reserved pool of memory is depleted.