Chapter 8: Main Memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition, Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Chapter 8: Memory Management

 Background
 Swapping
 Contiguous Memory Allocation
 Paging
 Structure of the Page Table
 Segmentation
 Example: The Intel Pentium

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Objectives

 To provide a detailed description of various ways of

organizing memory hardware
 To discuss various memory-management techniques,
including paging and segmentation
 To provide a detailed description of the Intel Pentium, which
supports both pure segmentation and segmentation with
paging

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Background

 Program must be brought (from disk) into memory and placed

within a process for it to be run
 Main memory and registers are only storage CPU can access
directly
 Register access in one CPU clock (or less)
 Main memory can take many cycles
 Cache sits between main memory and CPU registers
 Protection of memory required to ensure correct operation

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Base and Limit Registers
 A pair of base and limit registers define the logical address space

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Logical vs. Physical Address Space

 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 and physical addresses are the same in compile-time
and load-time address-binding schemes; logical (virtual) and
physical addresses differ in execution-time address-binding
scheme

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Memory-Management Unit (MMU)

 Hardware device that maps virtual to physical address

 In MMU scheme, the value in the relocation register is added to

every address generated by a user process at the time it is sent to
memory

 The user program deals with logical addresses; it never sees the
real physical addresses

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Dynamic relocation using a relocation register

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Swapping
 A process can be swapped temporarily out of memory to a backing store,
and then brought back into memory for continued execution

 Backing store – fast disk large enough to accommodate copies of all

memory images for all users; must provide direct access to these memory
images

 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

 Major part of swap time is transfer time; total transfer time is directly
proportional to the amount of memory swapped

 Modified versions of swapping are found on many systems (i.e., UNIX,

Linux, and Windows)
 System maintains a ready queue of ready-to-run processes which have
memory images on disk

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Schematic View of Swapping

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 Contiguous Allocation

 Main memory usually into two partitions:

 Resident operating system, usually held in low memory with
interrupt vector
 User processes then held in high memory

 Relocation registers used to protect user processes from each

other, and from changing operating-system code and data
 Base register contains value of smallest physical address
 Limit register contains range of logical addresses – each
logical address must be less than the limit register
 MMU maps logical address dynamically

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Hardware Support for Relocation and Limit Registers

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 Contiguous Allocation (Cont)

 Multiple-partition allocation
 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
 Operating system maintains information about:
a) allocated partitions b) free partitions (hole)

OS OS OS OS

process 5 process 5 process 5 process 5

process 9 process 9

process 8 process 10

process 2 process 2 process 2 process 2

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Dynamic Storage-Allocation Problem

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

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Fragmentation

 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
 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

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Paging

 Logical address space of a process can be noncontiguous;

process is allocated physical memory whenever the latter is
available
 Divide physical memory into fixed-sized blocks called frames
(size is power of 2, between 512 bytes and 8,192 bytes)
 Divide logical memory into blocks of same size called pages
 Keep track of all free frames
 To run a program of size n pages, need to find n free frames
and load program
 Set up a page table to translate logical to physical addresses
 Internal fragmentation

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Address Translation Scheme

 Address generated by CPU is divided into:

 Page number (p) – used as an index into a page table which

contains base address of each page in physical memory

 Page offset (d) – combined with base address to define the

physical memory address that is sent to the memory unit

page number page offset

p d
m-n n

 For given logical address space 2m and page size 2n

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Paging Hardware

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 Paging Model of Logical and Physical Memory

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 Paging Example

32-byte memory and 4-byte pages

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 Memory Protection

 Memory protection implemented by associating protection bit

with each frame

 Valid-invalid bit attached to each entry in the page table:

 “valid” indicates that the associated page is in the process’
logical address space, and is thus a legal page
 “invalid” indicates that the page is not in the process’
logical address space

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Valid (v) or Invalid (i) Bit In A Page Table

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 Shared Pages

 Shared code
 One copy of read-only (reentrant) code shared among
processes (i.e., text editors, compilers, window systems).
 Shared code must appear in same location in the logical
address space of all processes

 Private code and data

 Each process keeps a separate copy of the code and data
 The pages for the private code and data can appear
anywhere in the logical address space

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Shared Pages Example

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Segmentation

 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

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 User’s View of a Program

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 Logical View of Segmentation

4
1

3 2
4

user space physical memory space

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 Segmentation Architecture

 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

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Segmentation Hardware

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 Example of Segmentation

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 8.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009