Operating

Systems:
Internals
and Design Chapter 8
Principles Virtual
Memory
Ninth Edition
William Stallings

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 Table 8.1 Virtual Memory Terminology

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 Hardware and Control Structures
 Two characteristics fundamental to memory
management:
1) All memory references are logical addresses that are
dynamically translated into physical addresses at run time
2) A process may be broken up into a number of pieces that
don’t need to be contiguously located in main memory
during execution
 If these two characteristics are present, it is not
necessary that all of the pages or segments of a
process be in main memory during execution
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 Execution of a Process
 Operating system brings into main memory a few pieces of the
program
 Resident set
 Portion of process that is in main memory

 An interrupt is generated when an address

is needed that is not in main memory
 Operating system places the process in
a blocking state

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 Execution of a Process
 Piece of process that contains the logical address is
brought into main memory
 Operating system issues a disk I/O Read request
 Another process is dispatched to run while the disk I/O takes
place
 An interrupt is issued when disk I/O is complete, which causes
the operating system to place the affected process in the Ready
state

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 Implications
 More processes may be maintained in main memory
 Because only some of the pieces of any particular process are loaded, there is
room for more processes
 This leads to more efficient utilization of the processor because it is more
likely that at least one of the more numerous processes will be in a Ready state
at any particular time

 A process may be larger than all of main memory

 If the program being written is too large, the programmer must devise ways to
structure the program into pieces that can be loaded separately in some sort of
overlay strategy
 With virtual memory based on paging or segmentation, that job is left to the
OS and the hardware
 The OS automatically loads pieces of a process into main memory as required
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 Real and Virtual Memory
Real Virtual
memory memory
Main memory,
the actual Memory on disk
RAM

Allows for effective

multiprogramming and
relieves the user of
tight constraints of
main memory
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 Table 8.2
Characteristics
of Paging and
Segmentation

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 Thrashing

To avoid this, the

A state in which operating system tries
the system spends to guess, based on
most of its time recent history, which
swapping process pieces are least likely to
pieces rather than be used in the near
executing future
instructions

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 Principle of Locality
 Program and data references within a process tend to cluster
 Only a few pieces of a process will be needed over a short period
of time
 Therefore it is possible to make intelligent guesses about which
pieces will be needed in the future
 Avoids thrashing

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 Support Needed for Virtual
Memory

For virtual memory to be practical and effective:

• Hardware must support paging and

segmentation
• Operating system must include software for
managing the movement of pages and/or
segments between secondary memory and main
memory

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 Paging
 The term virtual memory is usually associated with systems that
employ paging
 Use of paging to achieve virtual memory was first reported for the
Atlas computer
 Each process has its own page table
 Each page table entry (PTE) contains the frame number of the
corresponding page in main memory
 A page table is also needed for a virtual memory scheme
based on paging

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 Inverted Page Table
 Page number portion of a virtual address is mapped into a hash value
 Hash value points to inverted page table

 Fixed proportion of real memory is required for the tables regardless

of the number of processes or virtual pages supported
 Structure is called inverted because it indexes page table entries by
frame number rather than by virtual page number

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 Inverted Page Table
Each entry in the page table includes:

Page Process Control Chain

number identifier bits pointer

• This is the • The process • Includes • The index

page that owns flags and value of the
this page protection next entry in
number and locking the chain
portion of information
the virtual
address
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reserved.
 Translation Lookaside
Buffer (TLB)
 To overcome the effect of
 Each virtual memory doubling the memory access
reference can cause two time, most virtual memory
physical memory accesses: schemes make use of a special
high-speed cache called a
 One to fetch the page
translation lookaside buffer
table entry
(TLB)
 One to fetch the data  This cache functions in
the same way as a
memory cache and
contains those page table
entities that have been
most recently used
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 Associative Mapping
 The TLB only contains some of the page table entries so we cannot
simply index into the TLB based on page number
 Each TLB entry must include the page number as well as the complete page
table entry

 The processor is equipped with hardware that allows it to interrogate

simultaneously a number of TLB entries to determine if there is a
match on page number

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 Page Size
 The smaller the page size, the lesser the amount of internal
fragmentation
 However, more pages are required per process
 More pages per process means larger page tables
 For large programs in a heavily multiprogrammed environment some
portion of the page tables of active processes must be in virtual
memory instead of main memory
 The physical characteristics of most secondary-memory devices favor a
larger page size for more efficient block transfer of data

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 Table 8.3

Example
of Page
Sizes

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 Page Size
The design issue of Main memory is
page size is related to getting larger and
the size of physical address space used by
main memory and applications is also
program size growing

 Contemporary programming
techniques used in large programs
Most obvious on
tend to decrease the locality of
personal computers
references within a process where applications are
becoming increasingly
complex
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 Segmentation
 Segmentation allows the programmer to view memory as
consisting of multiple address spaces or segments

Advantages:

 Simplifies handling of growing data structures

 Allows programs to be altered and recompiled independently
 Lends itself to sharing data among processes
 Lends itself to protection
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 Segment Organization
 Each segment table entry contains the starting address of the
corresponding segment in main memory and the length of the
segment
 A bit is needed to determine if the segment is already in main
memory
 Another bit is needed to determine if the segment has been modified
since it was loaded in main memory

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 Combined Paging and
Segmentation

In a combined
Segmentation is visible to the
paging/segmentation system a programmer
user’s address space is broken
up into a number of segments.
Each segment is broken up into
a number of fixed-sized pages
Paging is transparent to the
which are equal in length to a programmer
main memory frame

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 Protection and Sharing
 Segmentation lends itself to the implementation of protection and
sharing policies
 Each entry has a base address and length so inadvertent memory
access can be controlled
 Sharing can be achieved by segments referencing multiple processes

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 Operating System Software

The design of the memory management portion

of an operating system depends on three
fundamental areas of choice:

• Whether or not to use virtual memory techniques

• The use of paging or segmentation or both
• The algorithms employed for various aspects of
memory management

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 Table 8.4 Operating System Policies for Virtual Memory

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 Fetch Policy

 Determines when a
page should be Two main
brought into memory types:

Demand
Prepaging
Paging

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 Demand Paging
 Demand Paging
 Only brings pages into main memory when a reference is made to
a location on the page
 Many page faults when process is first started
 Principle of locality suggests that as more and more pages are
brought in, most future references will be to pages that have
recently been brought in, and page faults should drop to a very
low level

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 Prepaging
 Prepaging
 Pages other than the one demanded by a page fault are brought in
 Exploits the characteristics of most secondary memory devices
 If pages of a process are stored contiguously in secondary memory
it is more efficient to bring in a number of pages at one time
 Ineffective if extra pages are not referenced
 Should not be confused with “swapping”

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 Placement Policy
 Determines where in real memory a process piece is
to reside
 Important design issue in a segmentation system
 Paging or combined paging with segmentation
placing is irrelevant because hardware performs
functions with equal efficiency
 For NUMA systems an automatic placement strategy
is desirable
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 Replacement Policy
 Deals with the selection of a page in main memory to
be replaced when a new page must be brought in
 Objective is that the page that is removed be the page
least likely to be referenced in the near future
 The more elaborate the replacement policy the greater
the hardware and software overhead to implement it

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 Frame Locking
 When a frame is locked the page currently stored in that frame
may not be replaced
 Kernel of the OS as well as key control structures are held in
locked frames
 I/O buffers and time-critical areas may be locked into main
memory frames
 Locking is achieved by associating a lock bit with each frame

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 Basic Algorithms

Algorithms used for

the selection of a page
to replace:
• Optimal
• Least recently used (LRU)
• First-in-first-out (FIFO)
• Clock

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 Least Recently Used
(LRU)
 Replaces the page that has not been referenced for
the longest time
 By the principle of locality, this should be the page
least likely to be referenced in the near future
 Difficult to implement
 One approach is to tag each page with the time of last
reference
 This requires a great deal of overhead

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 First-in-First-out (FIFO)
 Treats page frames allocated to a process as a circular
buffer
 Pages are removed in round-robin style
 Simple replacement policy to implement

 Page that has been in memory the longest

is replaced

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 Clock Policy
 Requires the association of an additional bit with each frame
 Referred to as the use bit
 When a page is first loaded in memory or referenced, the use
bit is set to 1
 The set of frames is considered to be a circular buffer
 Any frame with a use bit of 1 is passed over by
the algorithm
 Page frames visualized as laid out in a circle

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 Page Buffering
 Improves paging A replaced page is
not lost, but rather
performance and assigned to one of
allows the use of a two lists

simpler page
replacement
policy
Free page list Modified page list

List of page frames

Pages are written
available for
out in clusters
reading in pages

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 Replacement Policy and Cache Size
 With large caches, replacement of pages can have a
performance impact
 If the page frame selected for replacement is in the cache, that
cache block is lost as well as the page that it holds
 In systems using page buffering, cache performance can be
improved with a policy for page placement in the page buffer
 Most operating systems place pages by selecting an arbitrary
page frame from the page buffer

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 Resident Set Management
 The OS must decide how many pages to bring into
main memory
 The smaller the amount of memory allocated to each process,
the more processes can reside in memory
 Small number of pages loaded increases page faults
 Beyond a certain size, further allocations of
pages will not effect the page fault rate

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 Resident Set Size
Fixed-allocation Variable-allocation
 Gives a process a fixed  Allows the number of page
number of frames in main frames allocated to a
memory within which to process to be varied over
execute the lifetime of the process
 When a page fault occurs,
one of the pages of that
process must be replaced

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 Replacement Scope
 The scope of a replacement strategy can be categorized as
global or local
 Both types are activated by a page fault when there are no free
page frames

Local
• Chooses only among the resident pages of the process that generated the
page fault

Global
• Considers all unlocked pages in main memory

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 Table 8.5 Resident Set Management

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 Fixed Allocation, Local Scope
 Necessary to decide ahead of time the amount of
allocation to give a process
 If allocation is too small, there will be a high page fault
rate

If allocation is too • Increased processor idle time

large, there will be • Increased time spent in
too few programs
in main memory swapping

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 Variable Allocation
Global Scope
 Easiest to implement
 Adopted in a number of operating systems

 OS maintains a list of free frames

 Free frame is added to resident set of process when a page fault occurs
 If no frames are available the OS must choose a page currently in
memory
 One way to counter potential problems is to use page buffering

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 Variable Allocation
Local Scope
 When a new process is loaded into main memory, allocate to it a
certain number of page frames as its resident set
 When a page fault occurs, select the page to replace from among the
resident set of the process that suffers the fault
 Reevaluate the allocation provided to the process and increase or
decrease it to improve overall performance

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 Variable Allocation
Local Scope
 Decision to increase or decrease a resident set size is based on
the assessment of the likely future demands of active
processes

Key elements:
• Criteria used to determine
resident set size
• The timing of changes

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 Page Fault Frequency
(PFF)
 Requires a use bit to be associated with each page in memory
 Bit is set to 1 when that page is accessed
 When a page fault occurs, the OS notes the virtual time since the last
page fault for that process
 Does not perform well during the transient periods when there is a
shift to a new locality

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 Variable-Interval Sampled
Working Set (VSWS)
 Evaluates the working set of a process at sampling instances based on
elapsed virtual time
 Driven by three parameters:

The number of
The minimum The maximum page faults that
duration of the duration of the are allowed to
sampling sampling occur between
interval interval sampling
instances

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 Cleaning Policy
 Concerned with determining when a modified page should be written
out to secondary memory

Demand Cleaning
A page is written out to secondary memory only when it has been selected for
replacement

Precleaning
Allows the writing of pages in batches

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 Load Control
 Determines the number of processes that will be resident in
main memory
 Multiprogramming level
 Critical in effective memory management
 Too few processes, many occasions when all processes will be
blocked and much time will be spent in swapping
 Too many processes will lead to thrashing

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 Process Suspension
 If the degree of multiprogramming is to be reduced, one or more of
the currently resident processes must be swapped out

Six possibilities exist:

• Lowest-priority process
• Faulting process
• Last process activated
• Process with the smallest resident set
• Largest process
• Process with the largest remaining execution window

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 UNIX
 Intended to be machine independent so its memory
management schemes will vary
 Early UNIX: variable partitioning with no virtual memory scheme
 Current implementations of UNIX and Solaris make use of paged
virtual memory
SVR4 and Solaris use
two separate schemes:
• Paging system
• Kernel memory allocator
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 Paging System and
Kernel Memory Allocator
Kernel Memory
Paging System
Allocator
Provides a virtual memory capability
that allocates page frames in main Allocates memory for the kernel
memory to processes

Allocates page frames to disk block

buffers

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 Table 8.6

UNIX SVR4
Memory
Management
Parameters
(page 1 of 2)

(Table can be found on page 381 in

the textbook)

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 Table 8.6
UNIX SVR4
Memory
Management
Parameters
(page 2 of 2)

(Table can be found

on page 381 in the
textbook)

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 Page Replacement
 The page frame data table is used for page
replacement
 Pointers are used to create lists within the table
 All available frames are linked together in a list of free frames
available for bringing in pages
 When the number of available frames drops below a certain
threshold, the kernel will steal a number of frames to
compensate

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 Kernel Memory Allocator
 The kernel generates and destroys small tables and buffers frequently
during the course of execution, each of which requires dynamic
memory allocation.
 Most of these blocks are significantly smaller than typical pages
(therefore paging would be inefficient)
 Allocations and free operations must be made as fast as possible

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 Lazy Buddy
 Technique adopted for SVR4
 UNIX often exhibits steady-state behavior in kernel
memory demand
 i.e. the amount of demand for blocks of a particular size varies
slowly in time

 Defers coalescing until it seems likely that it is needed,

and then coalesces as many blocks as possible

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 Linux
Memory Management
 Shares many characteristics with UNIX
 Is quite complex

• Process virtual
Two memory
main • Kernel memory
aspe allocation
cts

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 Linux Virtual Memory
 Three level page table structure:

Page directory Page middle directory Page table

Process has a single page

May span multiple pages May also span multiple pages
directory

Each entry points to one page Each entry points to one page Each entry refers to one virtual
of the page middle directory in the page table page of the process

Must be in main memory for an

active process

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 Linux Page Replacement
 Based on the clock algorithm
 The use bit is replaced with an 8-bit age variable
 Incremented each time the page is accessed

 Periodically decrements the age bits

 A page with an age of 0 is an “old” page that has not been
referenced in some time and is the best candidate for replacement

 A form of least frequently used policy

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© 2017 Pearson Education, Inc., Hoboken, NJ. All rights reserved.
 Kernel Memory Allocation
 Kernel memory capability manages physical main memory page frames
 Primary function is to allocate and deallocate frames for particular uses

Possible owners of a frame include:

• User-space processes
• Dynamically allocated kernel data
• Static kernel code
• Page cache
 A buddy algorithm is used so that memory for the kernel can be allocated
and deallocated in units of one or more pages
 Page allocator alone would be inefficient because the kernel requires small
short-term memory chunks in odd sizes
 Slab allocation
 Used by Linux to accommodate small chunks

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 Windows
Memory Management
 Virtual memory manager controls how memory is allocated
and how paging is performed
 Designed to operate over a variety of platforms
 Uses page sizes ranging from 4 Kbytes to 64 Kbytes

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Windows Virtual Address Map
 On 32 bit platforms each user process sees a separate 32 bit
address space allowing 4 GB of virtual memory per process
 By default half is reserved for the OS
 Large memory intensive applications run more effectively
using 64-bit Windows
 Most modern PCs use the AMD64 processor architecture
which is capable of running as either a 32-bit or 64-bit system

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© 2017 Pearson Education, Inc., Hoboken, NJ. All rights reserved.
 Windows Paging
 On creation, a process can make use of the entire user space of
almost 2 GB
 This space is divided into fixed-size pages managed in contiguous
regions allocated on 64 KB boundaries
 Regions may be in one of three states:

Available Reserved Committed

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 Resident Set
Management System
 Windows uses variable allocation, local scope
 When activated, a process is assigned a data structure
to manage its working set
 Working sets of active processes are adjusted
depending on the availability of main
memory

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 Android Memory Management
 Android includes a number of extensions to the normal Linux kernel memory management
facility

 These include:
 ASHMem
 This feature provides anonymous shared memory, which abstracts memory as file
descriptors
 A file descriptor can be passed to another process to share memory
 Pmem
 This feature allocates virtual memory so that it is physically contiguous
 This feature is useful for hardware that does not support virtual memory
 Low Memory Killer
 This feature enables the system to notify an app or apps that they need to free up
memory
 If an app does not cooperate, it is terminated
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 Summary
 Hardware and control structures  UNIX and Solaris memory
 Locality and virtual memory management
 Paging  Paging system
 Segmentation  Kernel memory allocator
 Combined paging and
segmentation
 Linux memory management
 Protection and sharing  Linux virtual memory
 Kernel memory allocation
 OS software
 Fetch policy  Windows memory management
 Placement policy  Windows virtual address
 Replacement policy map
 Resident set management  Windows paging
 Cleaning policy  Windows swapping
 Load control
 Android memory management
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