Presented by

Main Memory
Mohiuddin Ahmed
Lecturer
Department of CSE
RUET
 A pair of base and limit registers define the logical address space
 CPU must check every memory access generated in user mode to be sure it is between base and limit
for that user
 Programs on disk, ready to be brought into memory to execute form an input queue
 Without support, must be loaded into address 0000

 Inconvenient to have first user process physical address always at 0000

 How can it not be?

 Further, addresses represented in different ways at different stages of a program’s life

 Source code addresses usually symbolic
 Compiled code addresses bind to relocatable addresses
 i.e. “14 bytes from beginning of this module”
 Linker or loader will bind relocatable addresses to absolute addresses
 i.e. 74014
 Each binding maps one address space to another
 Address binding of instructions and data to memory addresses can happen at three
different stages
 Compile time: If memory location known a priori, absolute code can be generated; must
recompile code if starting location changes
 Load time: Must generate relocatable code if memory location is not known at compile time
 Execution time: Binding delayed until run time if the process can be moved during its execution
from one memory segment to another
 Need hardware support for address maps (e.g., base and limit registers)
 The concept of a logical address space that is bound to a separate physical address
space is central to proper memory management
 Logical address – generated by the CPU; also referred to as virtual address
 Physical address – address seen by the memory unit

 Logical address space is the set of all logical addresses generated by a program
 Physical address space is the set of all physical addresses generated by a program
 Hardware device that at run time maps virtual to physical address
 A process can be swapped temporarily out of memory to a backing store, and then brought back into
memory for continued execution
 Total physical memory space of processes can exceed physical memory

 Roll out, roll in – swapping variant used for priority-based scheduling algorithms; lower-priority
process is swapped out so higher-priority process can be loaded and executed
 Main memory must support both OS and user processes
 Limited resource, must allocate efficiently
 Contiguous allocation is one early method
 Main memory usually into two partitions:
 Resident operating system, usually held in low memory with
interrupt vector
 User processes then held in high memory
 Each process contained in single contiguous section of memory
 Multiple-partition allocation
 Degree of multiprogramming limited by number of partitions
 Variable-partition sizes for efficiency (sized to a given process’ needs)
 Hole – block of available memory; holes of various size are scattered throughout memory
 When a process arrives, it is allocated memory from a hole large enough to accommodate it
 Process exiting frees its partition, adjacent free partitions combined
 Operating system maintains information about:
a) allocated partitions b) free partitions (hole)
How to satisfy a request of size n from a list of free holes?

 First-fit: Allocate the first hole that is big enough

 Best-fit: Allocate the smallest hole that is big enough; must search entire list, unless
ordered by size
 Produces the smallest leftover hole

 Worst-fit: Allocate the largest hole; must also search entire list
 Produces the largest leftover hole

First-fit and best-fit better than worst-fit in terms of speed and storage utilization
 External Fragmentation – total memory space exists to satisfy a request, but it is
not contiguous
 Internal Fragmentation – allocated memory may be slightly larger than requested
memory; this size difference is memory internal to a partition, but not being used
 First fit analysis reveals that given N blocks allocated, 0.5 N blocks lost to
fragmentation
 1/3 may be unusable -> 50-percent rule
 Reduce external fragmentation by compaction
 Shuffle memory contents to place all free memory together in one large block
 Compaction is possible only if relocation is dynamic, and is done at execution
time
 I/O problem
 Latch job in memory while it is involved in I/O
 Do I/O only into OS buffers
 Memory-management scheme that supports user view of memory
 A program is a collection of segments
 A segment is a logical unit such as:

main program
procedure
function
method
object
local variables, global variables
common block
stack
symbol table
arrays
 1
1 4
2

3
4 2

user space physical memory space

 Logical address consists of a two tuple:
<segment-number, offset>,

 Segment table – maps two-dimensional physical addresses; each table entry has:
 base – contains the starting physical address where the segments reside in memory
 limit – specifies the length of the segment

 Segment-table base register (STBR) points to the segment table’s location in

memory

 Segment-table length register (STLR) indicates number of segments used by a

program;
segment number s is legal if s < STLR
 Protection
 With each entry in segment table associate:
 validation bit = 0  illegal segment
 read/write/execute privileges

 Protection bits associated with segments; code sharing occurs at

segment level
 Since segments vary in length, memory allocation is a dynamic storage-
allocation problem
 A segmentation example is shown in the following diagram