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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 modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or separate regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. [1] [a] Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour.
A similar mechanism is used for memory-mapped files, which are mapped to virtual memory and loaded to physical memory on demand. When physical memory is not full this is a simple operation; the page is written back into physical memory, the page table and TLB are updated, and the instruction is restarted.
In computing, a virtual address space (VAS) or address space is the set of ranges of virtual addresses that an operating system makes available to a process. [1] The range of virtual addresses usually starts at a low address and can extend to the highest address allowed by the computer's instruction set architecture and supported by the operating system's pointer size implementation, which can ...
In computer operating systems, demand paging (as opposed to anticipatory paging) is a method of virtual memory management. In a system that uses demand paging, the operating system copies a disk page into physical memory only when an attempt is made to access it and that page is not already in memory (i.e., if a page fault occurs).
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.
To use virtual 8086 mode, an operating system sets up a virtual 8086 mode monitor, which is a program that manages the real-mode program and emulates or filters access to system hardware and software resources. The monitor must run at privilege level 0 and in protected mode. Only the 8086 program runs in VM86 mode and at privilege level 3.
The operating system intercepts the page fault, loads the required memory page, and the application continues as if no fault had occurred. This scheme, a type of virtual memory, allows in-memory data not currently in use to be moved to secondary storage and back in a way which is transparent to applications, to increase overall memory capacity.