Physical address

In computing, a physical address, also real address, or binary address, is the memory address that is electronically (in the form of binary number) presented on the computer address bus circuitry in order to enable the data bus to access a particular storage cell of main memory.In a computer with virtual memory, the term physical address is used mostly to differentiate from a virtual address. In particular, in computers utilizing memory management unit (MMU) to translate memory addresses, the virtual and physical address refer to address before and after MMU translation, respectively.In networking, physical address is sometimes a synonym of MAC address. The address is actually used on network's data link layer, not on physical layer, as the name would suggest.Note: There are two basic types of physical addresses when referencing Ethernet which are large and fixed physical addresses and proNET, which has small realitivly easy to configure addresses.