Operating

Systems:
Internals
and Design Chapter 7
Principles Memory
Management
Seventh Edition
William Stallings
 Memory Management
Requirements
• Memory management is intended to satisfy the
following requirements:
• Relocation
• Protection
• Sharing
• Logical organization
• Physical organization
 Physical Organization

Cannot leave the

Memory available for a Programmer does not
programmer with the
program plus its data know how much space
responsibility to manage
may be insufficient will be available
memory

overlaying allows various

modules to be assigned
the same region of
memory but is time
consuming to program
Fixed Portioning
Equal-size partitions
– Any process whose size is less than or equal to the partition size can
be loaded into an available partition
– If all partitions are full, the operating system can swap a process out
of a partition
– A program may not fit in a partition. The programmer must design the
program with overlays
Fixed partitioning in main memory is inefficient.
– Any program, no matter how small, occupies an entire partition.
– What about the memory left over if the program does not fit perfectly.
– This is called internal fragmentation.
Fixed Portioning
Solution to Equal-size partitions?

– Assign each process to the smallest partition within which it will fit
– Queue for each partition
– Processes are assigned in such a way as to minimize wasted
memory within a partition
“Unequal size portioning”.

Less Internal fragmentation.

• The number of partitions specified at
system generation time limits the number
of active processes in the system
• Small jobs will not utilize partition space
efficiently
Dynamic Portioning
• Partitions are of variable length and number
• Process is allocated exactly as much memory as required
• Eventually get holes in the memory. This is called external
fragmentation
• Must use compaction

To shift processes so they are contiguous and all free memory is

in one block
 Placement Algorithms

Best-fit First-fit Next-fit

• chooses the • begins to scan • begins to scan

block that is memory from memory from
closest in size to the beginning the location of
the request and chooses the the last
first available placement and
block that is chooses the
large enough next available
block that is
large enough
 Addresses

Logical

• reference to a memory location independent of the current

assignment of data to memory

Relative

• address is expressed as a location relative to some known

point

Physical or Absolute

• actual location in main memory

Relocation
Paging
 Paging
Paging
Main memory and process both are divided into fixed size
small chunks, the chunk of process is known as page and
chunk of memory is known as frames.

Each process has its own page table

A bit is needed to indicate whether the page is in main
memory or not
Page table entry contains frame# of the corresponding page
in memory.
Paging
Paging
 Segmentation
• A program can be subdivided into segments
 may vary in length
 there is a maximum length
• Addressing consists of two parts:
 segment number
 an offset
• Similar to dynamic partitioning
• Eliminates internal fragmentation
• Paging is invisible to programmer while
segmentation is usually visible.
Logical view of segmentation
 Segmentation
Logical to physical address mapping
 Summary
• Memory Management
• one of the most important and complex tasks of an
operating system
• needs to be treated as a resource to be allocated to and
shared among a number of active processes
• desirable to maintain as many processes in main memory
as possible
• desirable to free programmers from size restriction in
program development
• basic tools are paging and segmentation (possible to
combine)
» paging – small fixed-sized pages
» segmentation – pieces of varying size
 Memory Management

Real memory
• main memory, the actual RAM

Virtual memory
• memory on disk
• allows for effective multiprogramming and relieves the user
of tight constraints of main memory
 Thrashing

A state in which
the system spends
most of its time
swapping process
pieces rather than
executing To avoid this, the
instructions operating system tries
to guess, based on
recent history, which
pieces are least likely to
be used in the near
future
 Principle of Locality

• Program and data references within a process tend

to cluster
• Only a few pieces of a process will be needed over
a short period of time
• Therefore it is possible to make intelligent guesses
about which pieces will be needed in the future
• Avoids thrashing
 Paging

• The term virtual memory is usually associated with

systems that employ paging
• Use of paging to achieve virtual memory was first
reported for the Atlas computer
• Each process has its own page table
– each page table entry contains the frame
number of the corresponding page in main
memory
Memory Management
Paging System
Two Level Paging
 Two Level Paging Example
A logical address (32bit machine, 4K page size) is divided into
•a page number consisting of 20 bits, a page offset
consisting of 12 bits
Since the page table is paged, the page number consists of
•a 10-bit page number, a 10-bit page offset
Thus, a logical address is organized as (p1,p2,d) where
•p1 is an index into the outer page table
•p2 is the displacement within the page of the outer page
table
Paging System with Inverted
Page Table
TLB
TLB
 Page Size

The design issue of page

main memory is getting
size is related to the size
larger and address space
of physical main
used by applications is
memory and program
also growing
size

• Contemporary programming
techniques (OO & multi-threading)
used in large programs tend to most obvious on
decrease the locality of references personal computers
within a process where applications are
becoming increasingly
complex
 Basic Algorithms
Algorithms used for the selection of a page to
replace:
1. Optimal
Replace the page that won’t be needed for the longest time in the
future
2. Least recently used (LRU
Replace the page that hasn’t been referenced for the longest time
3. First-in-first-out (FIFO)
4. Clock
Clock hand sweeps over pages looking for
one with used bit = 0
Replace pages that haven’t been referenced for
one complete revolution of the clock
Replacement policies
Replacement policies
Replacement policies
Clock Policy
 Summary
• Desirable to:
– maintain as many processes in main memory as possible
– free programmers from size restrictions in program
development
• With virtual memory:
– all address references are logical references that are translated
at run time to real addresses
– a process can be broken up into pieces
– two approaches are paging and segmentation
– management scheme requires both hardware and software
support