How can we get the physical address in GDB?

Question

OS prevents GDB from giving us the physical address, and instead we have virtual addresses. Is there a way to actually get that physical address?

Doing debugging on Windows Visual Studio looks more promising: the addresses look more like real addresses. However, are they really the physical addresses???

I have been investigating GDB and Visual Studio with the following source code for a few days already (and you can tell this from my profile)

int main()
{
  int a = 10;
  int b = 13;
  int c;
  c = a + b;
  return 0;

}

PS: I know I have been asking many similar questions. This is a super broad topic, and I thank you all the great helps. JFYI, it is 3:36AM :( and I do a lot of research + testing before I come here to ask. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you mean the actual address on the physical memory hardware, then there isn't really such a thing (consider that the OS may decide to swap your page to disk, etc.)

See here: How to translate a virtual memory address to a physical address?

Answer 2

You can't, the program and gdb simply don't know about it, which is the point of virtualizing the memory. The operating system takes care of distributing large enough chunks to programs on demand.