PAGING

The main functions of paging are performed when a program tries to access pages that are not currently mapped to physical memory (RAM). This situation is known as a page fault. The operating system must then take control and handle the page fault, in a manner invisible to the program. Therefore, the operating system must: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Determine the location of the data in auxiliary storage. Obtain an empty page frame in RAM to use as a container for the data. Load the requested data into the available page frame. Update the page table to show the new data. Return control to the program, transparently retrying the instruction that caused the page fault.

Until there is not enough RAM to store all the data needed, the process of obtaining an empty page frame does not involve removing another page from RAM. If all page frames are nonempty, obtaining an empty page frame requires choosing a page frame containing data to empty. If the data in that page frame has been modified since it was read into RAM (i.e., if it has become "dirty"), it must be written back to its location in secondary storage before being freed; otherwise, the contents of the page's page frame in RAM are the same as the contents of the page in secondary storage, so it does not need to be written back to secondary storage. If a reference is then made to that page, a page fault will occur, and an empty page frame must be obtained and the contents of the page in secondary storage again read into that page frame. Efficient paging systems must determine the page frame to empty by choosing one that is least likely to be needed within a short time. There are various page replacement algorithms that try to do this. Most operating systems use some approximation of the least recently used (LRU) page replacement algorithm (the LRU itself cannot be implemented on the current hardware) or a working set-based algorithm. To further increase responsiveness, paging systems may employ various strategies to predict which pages will be needed soon. Such systems will attempt to load pages into main memory preemptively, before a program references them.

Demand paging
Main article: Demand paging When pure demand paging is used, page loading only occurs at the time of the data request, and not before. In particular, when a demand pager is used, a program usually begins execution with none of its pages pre-loaded in RAM. Pages are copied from the executable file into RAM the first time the executing code references them, usually in response to page faults. As a consequence, pages of the executable file containing code not executed during a particular run will never be loaded into memory.

Anticipatory paging

This technique, sometimes called "swap prefetch", preloads a process's non-resident pages that are likely to be referenced in the near future (taking advantage of locality of reference). Such strategies attempt to reduce the number of page faults a process experiences. Some of those strategies are "if a program references one virtual address which causes a page fault, perhaps the next few pages' worth of virtual address space will soon be used" and "if one big program just finished execution, leaving lots of free RAM, perhaps the user will return to using some of the programs that were recently paged out".

Free page queue

The free page queue is a list of page frames that are available for assignment after a page fault. Some operating systems[NB 1] support page reclamation; if a page fault occurs for a page that had been stolen and the page frame was never reassigned, then the operating system avoids the necessity of reading the page back in by assigning the unmodified page frame.

Page stealing
Some operating systems periodically look for pages that have not been recently referenced and add them to the Free page queue, after paging them out if they have been modified.

Pre-cleaning
Unix operating systems periodically use sync to pre-clean all dirty pages, that is, to save all modified pages to hard disk. Windows operating systems do the same thing via "modified page writer" threads. Pre-cleaning makes starting a new program or opening a new data file much faster. The hard drive can immediately seek to that file and consecutively read the whole file into pre-cleaned page frames. Without pre-cleaning, the hard drive is forced to seek back and forth between writing a dirty page frame to disk, and then reading the next page of the file into that frame.

Thrashing
Main article: Thrashing (computer science) Most programs reach a steady state in their demand for memory locality both in terms of instructions fetched and data being accessed. This steady state is usually much less than the total memory required by the program. This steady state is sometimes referred to as the working set: the set of memory pages that are most frequently accessed. Virtual memory systems work most efficiently when the ratio of the working set to the total number of pages that can be stored in RAM is low enough that the time spent resolving page faults is not a dominant factor in the workload's performance. A program that works with huge data structures will sometimes require a working set that is too large to be efficiently managed by the page system resulting in constant page faults that drastically slow down the system. This condition is referred to as thrashing: pages are swapped out and then accessed causing frequent faults.

An interesting characteristic of thrashing is that as the working set grows, there is very little increase in the number of faults until the critical point (when faults go up dramatically and the majority of the system's processing power is spent on handling them). An extreme example of this sort of situation occurred on the IBM System/360 Model 67 and IBM System/370 series mainframe computers, in which a particular instruction could consist of an execute instruction, which crosses a page boundary, that the instruction points to a move instruction, that itself also crosses a page boundary, targeting a move of data from a source that crosses a page boundary, to a target of data that also crosses a page boundary. The total number of pages thus being used by this particular instruction is eight, and all eight pages must be present in memory at the same time. If the operating system will allocate less than eight pages of actual memory in this example, when it attempts to swap out some part of the instruction or data to bring in the remainder, the instruction will again page fault, and it will thrash on every attempt to restart the failing instruction. To decrease excessive paging, and thus possibly resolve thrashing problem, a user can do any of the following:

Increase the amount of RAM in the computer (generally the best long-term solution). Decrease the number of programs being concurrently run on the computer.

The term thrashing is also used in contexts other than virtual memory systems, for example to describe cache issues in computing or silly window syndrome in networking.

Sharing
In multi-programming or in multi-user environment it is common for many users to be executing the same program. If individual copies of these programs were given to each user, much of the primary storage would be wasted. Its solution is to share those pages that can be shared. Sharing must be carefully controlled to prevent one process from modifying data that another process is accessing. In most systems the shared programs are divided into separate pages i.e. coding and data are kept separate. This is achieved by having page map table entries of different processes point to the same page frame, that page frame is shared among those process.