Chapter 6

MEMORY MANAGEMENT VIRTUAL MEMORY

Introduction to Memory management
•Requirements
•Partitioning
•Swapping
•Virtual Memory
•Paging
•Page Replacement Policies.
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Introduction

 Memory is an important resource that needs to be managed properly.

 Why?-
 they are limited in nature!
 What is programmers/expert users need?
 Infinitely …
 less of this and less of that… more of this and more of that…
 Can the technology provide that?
 NO

 Hence the operating system owes to manage the memory.

 How?
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Introduction

 Memory management is the functionality of an operating system

which handles or manages primary memory and moves processes
back and forth between main memory and disk during execution.
 Memory management keeps track of each and every memory
location, regardless of either it is allocated to some process or it is free.
 It checks how much memory is to be allocated to processes. It
decides which process will get memory at what time.
 It tracks whenever some memory gets freed or unallocated and
correspondingly it updates the status.
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Introduction…

 The OS has a part called Memory manager that manipulates and

perform an operation on memory hierarchy.
Registers <1
nsec
2 nsec
Cache Memory
10 nsec
Main Memory
10 msec
Magnetic Disk
100 sec
Magnetic Tape
◦ Hence the MM has a responsibility to
 Keeps track of which is in use or not.
 Allocate and De-allocate
 Manage Swapping and etc.
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Memory Management

 Memory management systems are divided in to two classes.

◦ Those that move processes back and forth b/n main memory and disk (paging and
swapping) b/c of memory insufficiency
◦ Those that do not (simpler)

 Also the realm of software tech. persuade the creation of efficient

memory.
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Memory Management: Partitioning

 Partition: divide memory to partitions, and dynamically assign to

different processes.

 Fixed Partitioning

 Dynamic Partitioning
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Memory Management: Partitioning

 Fixed Partitioning

 Any process whose size is less than or equal to the

partition size can be loaded into an available partition.

 The operating system can swap a process out of a

partition.

 A program may not fit in a partition. – The programmer

must design the program with overlays.
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Memory Management: Partitioning

 Dynamic Partitioning

 Unequal-size partitioning.

 Smaller programs can be placed in

smaller partitions.

 Programs larger than 16M cannot be

accommodated without overlay.
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Swapping

 Swapping is a memory management technique used in

multi-programming to increase the number of processes
sharing the CPU.
 It is a technique of removing a process from the main
memory and storing it into secondary memory, and then
bringing it back into the main memory for continued
execution.
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Swapping

 Memory allocation changes as processes come into memory and

leave it.
 The shaded regions are unused memory.
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Swapping…

 Allocating space for a growing data segment.

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Swapping…

 Allocating space for a growing stack

and a growing data segment.
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MM with BM and LL

 As memory is assigned dynamically OS must manage it.

 There are two ways of keep track of memory usage

 Bitmaps

 Linked list/free list.

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MM using Bitmaps

 The Size of the bitmap

depends on the size of
memory and size of
the allocation unit.
 Divide memory into
allocation units.

 a) A part of memory with five processes and three holes. The tick marks show
the memory allocation units. The shaded regions (0 in the bitmap) are free.
 (b) The corresponding bitmap.
 (c) The same information as a list.
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MM using Linked List

 Hole – block of available memory.

 When a process arrives, it is allocated memory from a hole large enough to
accommodate it.
 Four neighbor combinations for the terminating process, X.
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Virtual Memory

 Formerly Overlays were used as a virtual memory.

It is a technique to run a program that is bigger than the

size of the physical memory by keeping only those
instructions and data that are needed at any given time.
◦ Splitting done manually by the programmer
◦ Swapping done by the system
◦ But some overlay systems were so complex and expensive to
work with. And the first task, by nature, is time consuming and
boring.
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Virtual Memory

 Hence in 1961 a method of doing everything using system is

advised.
◦ i.e. Virtual Memory.
 The main idea is to put currently used data, program and
stack in the main memory and the rest in the disk.
◦ i.e. X MB Program can run on Y MB machine where X>Y.
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Paging

 Paging is a function of memory management where a computer will

store and retrieve data from a device's secondary storage to the
primary storage.
 VM uses a technique called paging.
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Paging…

 Pages and page frames are always

equal. Here 4KB
 Virtual address
 Divided into pages

 Physical memory
 Divided into frames

 Page vs. Frame

 Same size block
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What happens if there is no free
frame?
 Page replacement – find some page in memory, but not really in use,
swap it out.
 Algorithm- want an algorithm which will result in minimum number of page faults.
 Performance – reduce overhead
 Same page may be brought into memory several times.
 Same with cache memory cleaning and removing heavily used web
pages from the server
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Basic Page Replacement

1. Find the location of the desired page on disk.

2. Find a free frame:
- If there is a free frame, use it.
- If there is no free frame, use a page replacement algorithm to select a
victim frame.
3. Read the desired page into the (newly) free frame. Update the page and
frame tables.
4. Restart the process.
 Use modify (dirty) bit to reduce overhead of page transfers – only modified
pages are written to disk.
 Page replacement completes separation between logical memory and
physical memory – large virtual memory can be provided on a smaller
physical memory.
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Page Replacement
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Page Replacement Algorithms

 Want lowest page-fault rate.

 Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular string of
memory references (reference string) and computing the
number of page faults on that string.
 In all our examples, the reference string are:
7 0 1 2 0 3 0 4 2 3 0 3 2 1 2 0 1 7 0 1
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• In this algorithm, operating system keeps track of all

pages in the memory in a queue, oldest page is in
the front of the queue.
• When a page needs to be replaced page in the
front of the queue is selected for removal.
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What happens when we have 4 frames?

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 Replace page that will not be used for longest period

of time.
 Each page will be labeled the number of instruction
that will be executed before that page is needed/ first
referenced.
 The only problem with this algorithm is unrealizable…
THE ONLY PROBLEM?
 How do you know this? Requires future knowledge!
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 The optimal algorithm uses the time when a page is to be used next
 FIFO uses the time when a page was brought into memory
 LRU – use the recent past as an approximation of the near future.
 Replace the page that has not been used for the longest period of time.
 Counter implementation
◦ Every page entry has a counter; every time page is referenced
through this entry, copy the clock into the counter.
◦ When a page needs to be changed, look at the counters to
determine which one is the smallest value and use that frame.
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End of Chapter 6