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Virtual memory combines active RAM and inactive memory on DASD [a] to form a large range of contiguous addresses.. In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, [b] is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" [3] which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory".
A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in a page table.It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in an operating system that uses virtual memory.
Physical memory can contain pages belonging to many processes. Pages can be held on disk if seldom used, or if physical memory is full. In the diagram above, some pages are not in physical memory. A page table is a data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer to store mappings between virtual addresses and physical addresses.
Memory virtualization technology follows from memory management architectures and virtual memory techniques. In both fields, the path of innovation has moved from tightly coupled relationships between logical and physical resources to more flexible, abstracted relationships where physical resources are allocated as needed.
Full virtualization requires that every salient feature of the hardware be reflected into one of several virtual machines – including the full instruction set, input/output operations, interrupts, memory access, and whatever other elements are used by the software that runs on the bare machine, and that is intended to run in a virtual machine.
Without protected memory, it is possible that a bug in one program will alter the memory used by another program. This will cause that other program to run off of corrupted memory with unpredictable results. If the operating system's memory is corrupted, the entire computer system may crash and need to be rebooted. At times programs ...
Virtual addresses seen by the program are added to the contents of the base register to generate the physical address. The address is checked against the contents of the bounds register to prevent a process from accessing memory beyond its assigned segment. The operating system is not constrained by the hardware and can access all of physical ...
Many operating systems can "trick" programs into using memory scattered around the hard disk and RAM as if it is one continuous chunk of memory, called virtual memory. The use of virtual memory addressing (such as paging or segmentation) means that the kernel can choose what memory each program may use at any given time, allowing the operating ...