Embedded Systems Design, 2nd Edition

Memory systems 93

memory is very small compared with the virtual memory size and

application, the memory management driver will consume a lot of

processing and time in simply moving data to and from the disk.

In extreme cases, this overhead starts to dominate the system

which is working hard but achieving very little. The addition of

more memory relieves the need to swap and returns more of the

system throughput to executing the application.

Segmentation and paging

There are two methods of splitting the system memory into

smaller blocks for memory management. The size of these blocks

is quite critical within the design. Each block requires a translation ...