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There are three different but related forms of fragmentation: external fragmentation, internal fragmentation, and data fragmentation, which can be present in isolation or conjunction. Fragmentation is often accepted in return for improvements in speed or simplicity. Analogous phenomena occur for other resources such as processors; see below.
Block suballocation addresses this problem by dividing up a tail block in some way to allow it to store fragments from other files. Some block suballocation schemes can perform allocation at the byte level; most, however, simply divide up the block into smaller ones (the divisor usually being some power of 2). For example, if a 38 KiB file is to be stored in a file system using 32
Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking, while deblocking is the process of extracting data from blocks. Blocked data is normally stored in a data buffer, and read or written a whole block at a time. Blocking reduces the overhead and speeds up the handling of the data stream. [3]
All references to code and data are made using a descriptor. When a request is made to access the block for reading or writing, the hardware checks its presence via the presence bit (pbit) in the descriptor. A pbit [29] of 1 indicates the presence of the block. In this case, the block can be accessed via the physical main-memory address in the ...
However, there still exists the problem of internal fragmentation – memory wasted because the memory requested is a little larger than a small block, but a lot smaller than a large block. Because of the way the buddy memory allocation technique works, a program that requests 66 K of memory would be allocated 128 K, which results in a waste of ...
Fragmentation can be remedied by re-organizing files and free space back into contiguous areas, a process called defragmentation. Solid-state drives do not physically seek, so their non-sequential data access is hundreds of times faster than moving drives, making fragmentation less of an issue. It is recommended to not manually defragment solid ...
Region-based memory management works best when the number of regions is relatively small and each contains many objects; programs that contain many sparse regions will exhibit internal fragmentation, leading to wasted memory and a time overhead for region management. Again, in the presence of region inference this problem can be more difficult ...
Relocation is the process of assigning load addresses for position-dependent code and data of a program and adjusting the code and data to reflect the assigned addresses. [1] [2] Prior to the advent of multiprocess systems, and still in many embedded systems, the addresses for objects are absolute starting at a known location, often zero.