Actually, there are several instances in which this
information is of benefit to users, even non-admin users. Off the top
of my head:
1) Users who experiance variable performance in a compute-intensive
task might want to investigate which physical memory pages their
application is using. There could be a cache thrashing problem,
as Richard demonstrated, or there could be uncached regions of
memory, as occurs on some x86 configurations.
2) Users who experience *incorrect* calculations might look for
a correlation with physical memory. This can happen; I have seen
it. Sometimes, with marginal memory chips, the timing is so
critical that only certain programs fails, and only with certain
data (gcc is the prime example). It is helpful to know all the
potential factors when debugging.
3) I/O problems can also be sensitive to physical memory address.
Finally, if Richard's patch, or something like it, could be
used to feed a program that displayed a map of physical memory and
showed which pages were mapped to which processes, well, that would be
just too cool!
Craig Milo Rogers
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