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A segment can be extended by allocating another memory page and adding it to the segment's page table. An implementation of virtual memory on a system using segmentation with paging usually only moves individual pages back and forth between main memory and secondary storage, similar to a paged non-segmented system. Pages of the segment can be ...
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.
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".
However, on the 80386, with its paged memory management unit it is possible to protect individual memory pages against writing. [4] [5] Memory models are not limited to 16-bit programs. It is possible to use segmentation in 32-bit protected mode as well (resulting in 48-bit pointers) and there exist C language compilers which support that. [6]
Paging allows the CPU to map any page of the virtual memory space to any page of the physical memory space. To do this, it uses additional mapping tables in memory called page tables. Protected mode on the 80386 can operate with paging either enabled or disabled; the segmentation mechanism is always active and generates virtual addresses that ...
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.
For example, if a 2 32 virtual address space is mapped to 4 KiB (2 12 bytes) pages, the number of virtual pages is 2 20 = (2 32 / 2 12). However, if the page size is increased to 32 KiB (2 15 bytes), only 2 17 pages are required. A multi-level paging algorithm can decrease the memory cost of allocating a large page table for each process by ...
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 ...