5.1. Why Have a Virtual Memory System?
A virtual memory system offers the following benefits:
It presents a simple memory programming model to applications so that application developers need not know how the underlying memory hardware is arranged.
It allows processes to see linear ranges of bytes in their address space, regardless of the physical layout or fragmentation of the real memory.
It gives us a programming model with a larger memory size than available physical storage (e.g., RAM) and enables us to use slower but larger secondary storage (e.g., disk) as a backing store to hold the pieces of memory that don't fit in physical memory.
A virtual view of memory storage, known as an address space, is presented to the application while the ...
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