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A paging system makes efficient decisions on which memory to relegate to secondary storage, leading to the best use of the installed RAM. In addition the operating system may provide services to programs that envision a larger memory, such as files that can grow beyond the limit of installed RAM.
Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. [1] [2] [3] A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping. [4]
The operating system must be prepared to handle misses, just as it would with a MIPS-style software-filled TLB. The IPT combines a page table and a frame table into one data structure. At its core is a fixed-size table with the number of rows equal to the number of frames in memory.
Typically, an operating system assigns each program its own virtual address space. [3] A paged MMU also mitigates the problem of external fragmentation of memory. After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller ...
In computer storage, fragmentation is a phenomenon in which storage space, such as computer memory or a hard drive, is used inefficiently, reducing capacity or performance and often both. The exact consequences of fragmentation depend on the specific system of storage allocation in use and the particular form of fragmentation.
The MMU detects the page fault, but the operating system's kernel handles the exception by making the required page accessible in the physical memory or denying an illegal memory access. Valid page faults are common and necessary to increase the amount of memory available to programs in any operating system that uses virtual memory , such as ...
Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
File segmentation, also called related-file fragmentation, or application-level (file) fragmentation, refers to the lack of locality of reference (within the storing medium) between related files. Unlike the previous two types of fragmentation, file scattering is a much more vague concept, as it heavily depends on the access pattern of specific ...