Chapter 9: Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Chapter 9: Virtual Memory
 Background
 Demand Paging
 Copy-on-Write
 Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 examine the relationship between shared memory and memory-mapped

files

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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
 Each program takes less memory while running -> more programs run at
the same time
 Increased CPU utilization and throughput with no increase in response
time or turnaround time
 Less I/O needed to load or swap programs into memory -> each user
program runs faster

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 address space – logical view of how process is stored in memory

 Usually start at address 0, contiguous addresses until end of space
 Meanwhile, physical memory organized in page frames
 MMU must map logical to physical
 Virtual memory can be implemented via:
 Demand paging
 Demand segmentation

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Virtual Memory That is
Larger Than Physical Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Virtual-address Space
 Usually design logical address space for
stack to start at Max logical address and
grow “down” while heap grows “up”
 Maximizes address space use
 Unused address space between the
two is hole
 No physical memory needed until
heap or stack grows to a given
new page
 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
Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Shared Library Using Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

 Similar to paging system with swapping

(diagram on right)

 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Basic Concepts
 With swapping, pager guesses which pages will be used before swapping out again
 Instead of swapping in a whole process, pager brings in only those pages into
memory
 How to determine that set of pages?
 Need new MMU functionality to implement demand paging
 If pages needed are already memory resident
 No difference from non demand-paging
 If page needed and not memory resident
 Need to detect and load the page into memory from storage
 Without changing program behavior
 Without programmer needing to change code

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 MMU address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table entry

is i  page fault
Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Page Table When Some Pages Are Not in Main Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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. Find free 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Steps in Handling a Page Fault

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

 Hardware support needed for demand paging

 Page table with valid / invalid bit
 Secondary memory (swap device with swap space)
 Instruction restart

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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
 Results depend on number of frames available

 In all our examples, the reference string of referenced page numbers is

7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Graph of Page Faults Versus
The Number of Frames

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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)

15 page faults

 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Optimal Algorithm
 Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
 9 is optimal for the example

 How do you know this?

 Can’t read the future

 Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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?

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition 9.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 End of Chapter 9

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 9 th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013