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In a system using segmentation, computer memory addresses consist of a segment id and an offset within the segment. [3] A hardware memory management unit (MMU) is responsible for translating the segment and offset into a physical address, and for performing checks to make sure the translation can be done and that the reference to that segment and offset is permitted.
Since the base is set to 0 in all cases and the limit 4 GiB, the segmentation unit does not affect the addresses the program issues before they arrive at the paging unit. (This, of course, refers to 80386 and later processors, as the earlier x86 processors do not have a paging unit.) Current Linux also uses GS to point to thread-local storage.
Defragmenting the page file is also occasionally recommended to improve performance when a Windows system is chronically using much more memory than its total physical memory. [17] This view ignores the fact that, aside from the temporary results of expansion, the page file does not become fragmented over time.
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 system to use the same memory locations for multiple tasks.
Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive , is referred to as paging or swapping.
Unlike virtual storage—paging or segmentation, rollout/rollin does not require any special memory management hardware; however, unless the system has relocation hardware such as a memory map or base and bounds registers, the program must be rolled back in to its original memory locations. Rollout/rollin has been largely superseded by virtual ...
Most computer architectures which support paging also use pages as the basis for memory protection. A page table maps virtual memory to physical memory. There may be a single page table, a page table for each process, a page table for each segment, or a hierarchy of page tables, depending on the architecture and the OS.
AMD-V can do virtual 8086 mode in guests, too, but it can also just run the guest in "paged real mode" using the following steps: you create a SVM (Secure Virtual Machine) mode guest with CR0.PE=0, but CR0.PG=1 (that is, with protected mode disabled but paging enabled), which is ordinarily impossible, but is allowed for SVM guests if the host ...