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Memory segmentation is an operating system memory management technique of dividing a computer's primary memory into segments or sections. In a computer system using segmentation, a reference to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset (memory location) within that segment.
Overlays are not a method of paging RAM to disk but merely of minimizing the program's RAM use. Subsequent architectures used memory segmentation, and individual program segments became the units exchanged between disk and RAM. A segment was the program's entire code segment or data segment, or sometimes other large data structures.
If the paging unit is enabled, addresses in a segment are now virtual addresses, rather than physical addresses as they were on the 80286. That is, the segment starting address, the offset, and the final 32-bit address the segmentation unit derived by adding the two are all virtual (or logical) addresses when the paging unit is enabled.
Illegal accesses and invalid page faults can result in a segmentation fault or bus error, resulting in an app or OS crash. Software bugs are often the causes of these problems, but hardware memory errors, such as those caused by overclocking, may corrupt pointers and cause valid code to fail.
This will typically occur because of a programming error, and the operating system must take some action to deal with the problem. On modern operating systems, it will cause a segmentation fault signal being sent to the offending program. The lookup may also fail if the page is currently not resident in physical memory.
The 80286 added an MMU that supports segmentation, but not paging. When segmentation is enabled by turning on protected mode, the segment number acts as an index into a table of segment descriptors; a segment descriptor contains a base physical address, a segment length, a presence bit to indicate whether the segment is currently in memory ...
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).
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 ...