For its finest-grained permissions tables, MMP stores two bits of permissions data per 32-bit word, so the space cost for the tables is , or 6.25%. Applications that use coarse-grained permissions regions can experience less than 6.25% space overhead, potentially much less (e.g less than 0.7% for putting each program section in its own protection region [7]). The space overhead of the tables is proportional to how densely the address space is being used, with lower density leading to higher overhead (just as with page tables).
If multiple protection domains are arranged densely in the address space (as kernel module code and data are arranged in Linux), then there is little additional space cost to dividing domains. Each new domain requires a root table, which has a fixed cost of 4KB (though they can be made smaller if need be). The root tables need to be stored in unmapped kernel memory, but user root tables can be swapped. Domains that share a permissions view for much of memory can share permissions tables below the root level.