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Segmentation is one of the most common ways to achieve memory protection; another common one is paging. In a computer system using segmentation, an instruction operand that refers to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset within that segment. A segment has a set of permissions, and a length, associated with it. If the currently running process is allowed by the permissions to make the type of reference to memory that it is attempting to make, and the offset within the segment is within the range specified by the length of the segment, the reference is permitted; otherwise, a hardware exception is delivered.

In addition to the set of permissions and length, a segment also has associated with it information indicating where the segment is located in memory. It may also have a flag indicating whether the segment is present in main memory or not; if the segment is not present in main memory, an exception is delivered, and the operating system will read the segment into memory from secondary storage. The information indicating where the segment is located in memory might be the address of the first location in the segment, or might be the address of a page table for the segment. In the first case, if a reference to a location within a segment is made, the offset within the segment will be added to address of the first location in the segment to give the address in memory of the referred-to item; in the second case, the offset of the segment is translated to a memory address using the page table.

In most systems in which a segment doesn't have a page table associated with it, the address of the first location in the segment is an address in main memory; in those systems, no paging is done. In the Intel 80386 and later, that address can either be an address in main memory, if paging is not enabled, or an address in a paged "linear" address space, if paging is enabled.

A memory management unit (MMU) is responsible for translating a segment and offset within that segment into a memory address, and for performing checks to make sure the translation can be done and that the reference to that segment and offset is permitted.

This usage should not be confused with that of the memory segments used by early x86 processors such as the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088, as they did not provide any protection; segmentation in the Intel 80286 and later provided protection.

For details of x86's implementation of segmentation in both 16-bit and 32-bit mode, please see the article on x86 memory segments.

• Virtual memory
• Text segment
• Data segment
• Virtual address space