Who can change main memory contents besides CPU itself?

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devuniv

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Aug 4, 2017
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Who can change main memory contents besides CPU itself?

Wikipedia speaking about working of CPU caches that "data in the main memory may be changed by other entities than CPU itself (e.g. peripherals using direct memory access (DMA)".

Could you give a real-life use-case / example of this?

I thought CPU itself askes DMA to fetch some data from HDD, DMA does it for CPU and then notifies CPU that data are in main memory. But here CPU initiates it anyway.
 
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CountMike
Well, BIOS is there in between, than comes OS and programs themselves. So anything running in the computer keeps memory in constant state of flux . Even HW and otherwise reserved memory is being switched around to the point of it being swapped to disk. All is happening with every memory refresh but OS is tasked to keep tabs on every change and assign proper space for a program to run in.
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CountMike

CountMike

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Well, BIOS is there in between, than comes OS and programs themselves. So anything running in the computer keeps memory in constant state of flux . Even HW and otherwise reserved memory is being switched around to the point of it being swapped to disk. All is happening with every memory refresh but OS is tasked to keep tabs on every change and assign proper space for a program to run in.
 
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