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Paging is one way of allowing the size of the addresses used by a process, which is the process's "virtual address space" or "logical address space", to be different from the amount of main memory actually installed on a particular computer, which is the physical address space.
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".
A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, ... Memory paging; Virtual memory; Zero page - a (often 256-bytes large ...
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 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).
In the early days of virtual memory, time spent on cleaning was not of much concern, because virtual memory was first implemented on systems with full duplex channels to the stable storage, and cleaning was customarily overlapped with paging. Contemporary commodity hardware, on the other hand, does not support full duplex transfers, and ...
With virtual memory, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory; this non-contiguous allocation is one of the benefits of paging. [8] [3] However, paged mapping causes another problem, internal fragmentation. This occurs when a program requests a block of memory that does not ...
Pages in the page cache modified after being brought in are called dirty pages. [5] Since non-dirty pages in the page cache have identical copies in secondary storage (e.g. hard disk drive or solid-state drive), discarding and reusing their space is much quicker than paging out application memory, and is often preferred over flushing the dirty pages into secondary storage and reusing their space.