Chapter 8: Virtual Memory: Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009 Operating System Concepts - 8 Edition

Chapter 8: Virtual Memory
Operating System Concepts– 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
Chapter 8: Virtual Memory
 Background
 Demand Paging
 Copy-on-Write
 Page Replacement
 Allocation of Frames
Operating System Concepts– 8th Edition 9.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©20009
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 principle of the working-set model
Background
 Code needs to be in memory to execute, but entire program rarely
used
 Error code, unusual routines, large data structures
 Entire program code not needed at same time
 Consider ability to execute partially-loaded program
 Program no longer constrained by limits of physical memory
 Program and programs could be larger than physical memory
Background
 Virtual memory – separation of user logical memory from physical memory
 Only part of the program needs to be in memory for execution
 Logical address space can therefore be much larger than physical
address space
 Allows address spaces to be shared by several processes
 Allows for more efficient process creation
 More programs running concurrently
 Less I/O needed to load or swap processes
 Virtual memory can be implemented via:

 Demand paging
 Demand segmentation
Virtual Memory That is
Larger Than Physical Memory
Virtual-address Space
Virtual Address Space
 Enables sparse address spaces with holes left for growth, dynamically
linked libraries, etc
 System libraries shared via mapping into virtual address space
 Shared memory by mapping pages read-write into virtual address space
 Pages can be shared during fork(), speeding process creation
Shared Library Using Virtual Memory
Demand Paging
 Could bring entire process into memory at load time
 Or bring a page into memory only when it is needed
 Less I/O needed, no unnecessary I/O
 Less memory needed
 Faster response
 More users
 Page is needed  reference to it

 invalid reference  abort
 not-in-memory  bring to memory
 Lazy swapper – never swaps a page into memory unless page will be needed
 Swapper that deals with pages is a pager
Transfer of a Paged Memory to
Contiguous Disk Space
Valid-Invalid Bit
 With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v  in-memory – memory resident, i  not-in-memory)
 Initially valid–invalid bit is set to i on all entries
 Example of a page table snapshot:
Frame # valid-invalid bit
v
v
v
v
i
….
i
i
page table
 During address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table entry

is I  page fault
Page Table When Some Pages
Are Not in Main Memory
Page Fault
 If there is a reference to a page, first reference to that page will trap
to operating system:
page fault
1. Operating system looks at another table to decide:
 Invalid reference  abort
 Just not in memory
2. Get empty frame
3. Swap page into frame via scheduled disk operation
4. Reset tables to indicate page now in memory
Set validation bit = v
5. Restart the instruction that caused the page fault
Aspects of Demand Paging
 Extreme case – start process with no pages in memory
 OS sets instruction pointer to first instruction of process, non-memory-
resident -> page fault
 And for every other process pages on first access
 Pure demand paging
 Actually, a given instruction could access multiple pages -> multiple page faults
 Pain decreased because of locality of reference
 Hardware support needed for demand paging
 Page table with valid / invalid bit
 Secondary memory (swap device with swap space)
 Instruction restart
Instruction Restart
 Consider an instruction that could access several different locations
 block move
 auto increment/decrement location

 Restart the whole operation?
 What if source and destination overlap?
Steps in Handling a Page Fault
Performance of Demand Paging
 Stages in Demand Paging
1. Trap to the operating system
2. Save the user registers and process state
3. Determine that the interrupt was a page fault
4. Check that the page reference was legal and determine the location of the page on the disk
5. Issue a read from the disk to a free frame:
1. Wait in a queue for this device until the read request is serviced
2. Wait for the device seek and/or latency time
3. Begin the transfer of the page to a free frame
6. While waiting, allocate the CPU to some other user
7. Receive an interrupt from the disk I/O subsystem (I/O completed)
8. Save the registers and process state for the other user
9. Determine that the interrupt was from the disk
10. Correct the page table and other tables to show page is now in memory
11. Wait for the CPU to be allocated to this process again
12. Restore the user registers, process state, and new page table, and then resume the interrupted instruction
Performance of Demand Paging (Cont.)
 Page Fault Rate 0  p  1
 if p = 0 no page faults
 if p = 1, every reference is a fault
 Effective Access Time (EAT)
EAT = (1 – p) x memory access

+ p (page fault overhead
+ swap page out
+ swap page in
+ restart overhead
)
Demand Paging Example
 Memory access time = 200 nanoseconds
 Average page-fault service time = 8 milliseconds
 EAT = (1 – p) x 200 + p (8 milliseconds)
= (1 – p x 200 + p x 8,000,000
= 200 + p x 7,999,800
 If one access out of 1,000 causes a page fault, then
EAT = 8.2 microseconds.

This is a slowdown by a factor of 40!!
 If want performance degradation < 10 percent
 220 > 200 + 7,999,800 x p
20 > 7,999,800 x p
 p < .0000025
 < one page fault in every 400,000 memory accesses
Demand Paging Optimizations
 Copy entire process image to swap space at process load time
 Then page in and out of swap space
 Used in older BSD Unix
 Demand page in from program binary on disk, but discard rather than
paging out when freeing frame
 Used in Solaris and current BSD
Copy-on-Write
 Copy-on-Write (COW) allows both parent and child processes to initially
share the same pages in memory
 If either process modifies a shared page, only then is the page copied
 COW allows more efficient process creation as only modified pages are
copied
 In general, free pages are allocated from a pool of zero-fill-on-demand
pages
 Why zero-out a page before allocating it?
 vfork() variation on fork() system call has parent suspend and child
using copy-on-write address space of parent
 Designed to have child call exec()
 Very efficient
Before Process 1 Modifies Page C
After Process 1 Modifies Page C
What Happens if There is no Free Frame?
 Used up by process pages

 Also in demand from the kernel, I/O buffers, etc
 How much to allocate to each?
 Page replacement – find some page in memory, but not really in use,
page it out
 Algorithm – terminate? swap out? replace the page?
 Performance – want an algorithm which will result in minimum
number of page faults
 Same page may be brought into memory several times
Page Replacement
 Prevent over-allocation of memory by modifying page-fault service
routine to include page replacement
 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
Need For Page Replacement
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
- Write victim frame to disk if dirty
3. Bring the desired page into the (newly) free frame; update the page and frame
tables
4. Continue the process by restarting the instruction that caused the trap
Note now potentially 2 page transfers for page fault – increasing EAT
Page Replacement
Page and Frame Replacement Algorithms
 Frame-allocation algorithm determines
 How many frames to give each process
 Which frames to replace
 Page-replacement algorithm
 Want lowest page-fault rate on both first access and re-access
 Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular string of memory references

(reference string) and computing the number of page faults on that string
 String is just page numbers, not full addresses
 Repeated access to the same page does not cause a page fault
 In all our examples, the reference string is
7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1
Graph of Page Faults Versus
The Number of Frames
First-In-First-Out (FIFO) Algorithm
 Reference string: 7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1
 3 frames (3 pages can be in memory at a time per process)
1 7 2 4 0 7
2 0 3 2 1 0 15 page faults
3 1 0 3 2 1
 Can vary by reference string: consider 1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5

 Adding more frames can cause more page faults!
 Belady’s Anomaly
 How to track ages of pages?

 Just use a FIFO queue Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©20009
Operating System Concepts– 8th Edition 9.32
FIFO Page Replacement
FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly
Optimal Algorithm
 Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
 9 is optimal for the example on the next slide
 How do you know this?

 Can’t read the future
 Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs
Optimal Page Replacement
Least Recently Used (LRU) Algorithm
 Use past knowledge rather than future

 Replace page that has not been used in the most amount of time
 Associate time of last use with each page
 12 faults – better than FIFO but worse than OPT

 Generally good algorithm and frequently used
 But how to implement?
LRU Algorithm (Cont.)
 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 find smallest value
 Search through table needed
 Stack implementation
 Keep a stack of page numbers in a double link form:
 Page referenced:
 move it to the top
 requires 6 pointers to be changed
 But each update more expensive
 No search for replacement
 LRU and OPT are cases of stack algorithms that don’t have Belady’s Anomaly
Use Of A Stack to Record The
Most Recent Page References
LRU Approximation Algorithms
 LRU needs special hardware and still slow
 Reference bit
 With each page associate a bit, initially = 0
 When page is referenced bit set to 1
 Replace any with reference bit = 0 (if one exists)
 We do not know the order, however
 Second-chance algorithm
 Generally FIFO, plus hardware-provided reference bit
 Clock replacement
 If page to be replaced has
 Reference bit = 0 -> replace it
 reference bit = 1 then:
– set reference bit 0, leave page in memory
– replace next page, subject to same rules
Second-Chance (clock) Page-Replacement Algorithm
Counting Algorithms
 Keep a counter of the number of references that have been made to
each page
 Not common
 LFU Algorithm: replaces page with smallest count
 MFU Algorithm: based on the argument that the page with the
smallest count was probably just brought in and has yet to be used
Page-Buffering Algorithms
 Keep a pool of free frames, always
 Then frame available when needed, not found at fault time
 Read page into free frame and select victim to evict and add to free pool
 When convenient, evict victim
 Possibly, keep list of modified pages
 When backing store otherwise idle, write pages there and set to non-dirty
 Possibly, keep free frame contents intact and note what is in them
 If referenced again before reused, no need to load contents again from
disk
 Generally useful to reduce penalty if wrong victim frame selected
Applications and Page Replacement
 All of these algorithms have OS guessing about future page access
 Some applications have better knowledge – i.e. databases
 Memory intensive applications can cause double buffering
 OS keeps copy of page in memory as I/O buffer
 Application keeps page in memory for its own work
 Operating system can given direct access to the disk, getting out of the
way of the applications
 Raw disk mode
 Bypasses buffering, locking, etc
Allocation of Frames
 Each process needs minimum number of frames

 Example: IBM 370 – 6 pages to handle SS MOVE instruction:
 instruction is 6 bytes, might span 2 pages
 2 pages to handle from
 2 pages to handle to
 Maximum of course is total frames in the system
 Two major allocation schemes
 fixed allocation
 priority allocation
 Many variations
Fixed Allocation
 Equal allocation – For example, if there are 100 frames (after
allocating frames for the OS) and 5 processes, give each process
20 frames
 Keep some as free frame buffer pool
 Proportional allocation – Allocate according to the size of process

 Dynamic asofdegree
si  size ofpmultiprogramming, process
process m  64 sizes
i
change s  10
1
S   si s2  127
m  total number of frames a1 
10
 64  5
137
s 127
ai  allocation for pi  i  m a2 
137
 64  59
S

Priority Allocation
 Use a proportional allocation scheme using priorities rather than
size
 If process Pi generates a page fault,

 select for replacement one of its frames
 select for replacement a frame from a process with lower priority
number
Global vs. Local Allocation
 Global replacement – process selects a replacement frame from

the set of all frames; one process can take a frame from another
 But then process execution time can vary greatly
 But greater throughput so more common
 Local replacement – each process selects from only its own set of
allocated frames
 More consistent per-process performance
 But possibly underutilized memory
Non-Uniform Memory Access
 So far all memory accessed equally
 Many systems are NUMA – speed of access to memory varies
 Consider system boards containing CPUs and memory, interconnected over a
system bus
 Optimal performance comes from allocating memory “close to” the CPU on which the
thread is scheduled
 And modifying the scheduler to schedule the thread on the same system board
when possible
 Solved by Solaris by creating lgroups
 Structure to track CPU / Memory low latency groups
 Used my schedule and pager
 When possible schedule all threads of a process and allocate all memory for
that process within the lgroup
End of Chapter 8
Operating System Concepts– 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009

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Chapter 8: Virtual Memory

 To explain the concepts of demand paging, page-replacement

 To discuss the principle of the working-set model

 Virtual memory can be implemented via:

 Page is needed  reference to it

 During address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table entry

 auto increment/decrement location

 Effective Access Time (EAT)

EAT = (1 – p) x memory access

 EAT = (1 – p) x 200 + p (8 milliseconds)

EAT = 8.2 microseconds.

 Used up by process pages

 Same page may be brought into memory several times

 Use modify (dirty) bit to reduce overhead of page transfers – only

 Page replacement completes separation between logical memory

1. Find the location of the desired page on disk

2. Find a free frame:

 Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular string of memory references

 Can vary by reference string: consider 1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5

 How to track ages of pages?

 How do you know this?

 Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs

 Use past knowledge rather than future

 12 faults – better than FIFO but worse than OPT

 LFU Algorithm: replaces page with smallest count

 Each process needs minimum number of frames

 Proportional allocation – Allocate according to the size of process

 If process Pi generates a page fault,

 Global replacement – process selects a replacement frame from

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