&gt; That same scenario with data that could use virtual memory would be a non-issue<p>Untrue I&#x27;m afraid - the case I&#x27;m basing this example off of could (and did) happen in virtual address space as well.<p>&gt; since you could mash the available fragmented phsyical ram together into whatever size blocks were needed using the MMU.<p>Okay, so your physical memory is no longer fragmented.  Unfortunately, your virtual address space still is.  If I need to allocate a 3MB contiguous chunk of virtual address space (I do), I&#x27;m still SOL.<p>All the MMU gains you in this respect is a &quot;free&quot; memcpy - twiddle some MMU bits instead of copying data around from one buffer to another.  It won&#x27;t fix up any of your pointers.