How many GB does Windows NT allocate to a process?

Question

Virtualization

Stupid question. On the Internet they write that for the 1st process on the IA-32, win32 platform, a 4 GB sandbox is allocated to it, in which it has only 2 GB of virtual address space.
And for a 64-bit application on IA-32_64 with Windows 64-bit, what is the size of the address space?

Answer 1

With IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE set (default):
x64: 8 TB
Intel Itanium-based systems: 7 TB
Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2: 128 TB
2 GB with IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE cleared
From here.

Answer 2

I agree with SyavaSyava - Windows is capable of both dynamically and statically allocating memory. Moreover, you can watch "alien" memory (!) And even manage it ... of course, we are not talking about any 2GB per process. The numbers are probably a memory limit per process. Or are you confusing GB with MB

Answer 3

Programs work with memory using pointers to areas of memory (addresses). That is, you can take it right here and now and try to read / write a memory cell at any address. For this, the program will almost always be killed, but it does not matter.
32-bit programs work with 32-bit addresses, 64-bit programs with 64-bit ones.
A 32-bit address allows you to access any memory location within 2 ^ 32 = 4 GB.
64-bit address -- to any within 2^64 bytes.
In the case of win32, part of the memory of these 4 GB is occupied by the OS kernel. That is, the program can still access memory that belongs to the kernel and will still be killed.
In fact, the maximum amount of memory in win32 that the OS can allocate to a program is about 2 GB. The rest is somehow unavailable.