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An implementation of virtual memory on a system using segmentation without paging requires that entire segments be swapped back and forth between main memory and secondary storage. When a segment is swapped in, the operating system has to allocate enough contiguous free memory to hold the entire segment.
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".
In computer operating systems, memory paging (or swapping on some Unix-like systems) is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage [a] for use in main memory. [1] In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages.
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.
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, protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, [1] is an operational mode of x86-compatible central processing units (CPUs). It allows system software to use features such as segmentation, virtual memory, paging and safe multi-tasking designed to increase an operating system's control over application software.
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.