Inside Macintosh: Memory
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On suitably equipped Macintosh computers, the Operating System supports 32-bit addressing, that is, the ability to use 32 bits to determine memory addresses. Earlier versions of system software use 24-bit addressing, where the upper 8 bits of memory addresses are ignored or used as flag bits. In a 24-bit addressing scheme, the logical address space has a size of 16 MB. Because 8 MB of this total are reserved for I/O space, ROM, and slot space, the largest contiguous program address space is 8 MB. When 32-bit addressing is in operation, the maximum program address space is 1 GB.
The ability to operate with 32-bit addressing is available only on certain Macintosh models, namely those with systems that contain a 32-bit Memory Manager. (For compatibility reasons, these systems also contain a 24-bit Memory Manager.) In order for your application to work when the machine is using 32-bit addressing, it must be 32-bit clean, that is, able to run in an environment where all 32 bits of a memory address are significant. Fortunately, writing applications that are 32-bit clean is relatively easy if you follow the guidelines in Inside Macintosh. In general, applications are not 32-bit clean because they manipulate flag bits in master pointers directly (for instance, to mark the associated memory blocks as locked or purgeable) instead of using Memory Manager routines to achieve the desired result. See "Relocatable and Nonrelocatable Blocks" for a description of master pointers.
You should never make assumptions about the contents of Memory Manager data structures, including master pointers and zone headers. These structures have changed in the past and they are likely to change again in the future.
Occasionally, an application running when 24-bit addressing is enabled might need to modify memory addresses to make them compatible with the 24-bit Memory Manager. In addition, drivers or other code might need to use 32-bit addresses, even when running in 24-bit mode. See the descriptions of the routines StripAddress and Translate24to32 in the chapter "Memory Management Utilities" for details.