Operating System Concepts Essentials

Chapter 8. Virtual Memory

In Chapter 7, we discussed various memory-management strategies used in computer systems. All these strategies have the same goal: to keep many processes in memory simultaneously to allow multiprogramming. However, they tend to require that an entire process be in memory before it can execute.

Virtual memory is a technique that allows the execution of processes that are not completely in memory. One major advantage of this scheme is that programs can be larger than physical memory. Further, virtual memory abstracts main memory into an extremely large, uniform array of storage, separating logical memory as viewed by the user from physical memory. This technique frees programmers from the concerns of memory-storage limitations. Virtual memory also allows processes to share files easily and to implement shared memory. In addition, it provides an efficient mechanism for process creation. Virtual memory is not easy to implement, however, and may substantially decrease performance if it is used carelessly. In this chapter, we discuss virtual memory in the form of demand paging and examine its complexity and cost.

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

• To describe the benefits of a virtual-memory system.

• To explain the concepts of demand paging, page-replacement algorithms, and allocation of page frames.

• To discuss the principles of the working-set model.

Background

The memory-management algorithms outlined in Chapter 7 are necessary because of one basic requirement: The instructions being ...