Is it possible to get the Physical memory address of a variable in python?

[Ognjen Bezanov]

Hey,

Thanks for all the responses guys. In hindsight I probably should have 
explained why on earth I'd need the physical address from an interpreted 
language.

I'm trying to see if there is any way I can make Python share data 
between two hosts using DMA transfers over a firewire connection, so 
avoiding the need for another layer on top such as IPv4 + Python sockets.

Thanks to some old python bindings which I updated to python 2.6, I can 
read any write to the RAM of any firewire connected host within python. 
Because it uses DMA (the cpu is not involved in this at all), I can only 
specify a physical address within the 4GB ram limit to read from and 
write to.

Now what I've done so far is on the remote host I run python and set a 
variable as so:

a = "foo"
print a
'foo'

Then on the local host I run a python script that scans the entire RAM 
looking for the string "foo", and replaces it with the string "oof". I 
have had success with this method. Once it's done and I do "print a" on 
the remote host, I get "oof" as the variable value, so in theory it can 
work.

Problem is that it's slow. Scanning 3GB of RAM every time you want to do 
this is not a good method. I thought that if I could get python to 
return the physical address of where the value of a variable is, then I 
can just jump to that address and write the data.

 From what I've been told so far, it's not possible to do this without 
some OS-specific (Linux in this case) syscall. Is this correct?

Thanks!


Ognjen