Unit 5-6

Virtual
Memory
Dr Damitha Kar u naratna
Univer s ity of Colombo school of computing

Operating Systems

Virtual memory
Is it necessary to load an entire
program to the memory for execution?
If the size of the program is larger than
the available memory how can it be
execute?

Operating Systems

Virtual Memory - Goals

Allow applications larger than physical memory to execute.
Run partially loaded programs Entire program need not
to be in memory all the time.
Multiprogramming: Many programs simultaneously reside
in memory.
Allow re-locatable programs anywhere, anytime
Application Portability:
Applications should not have to manage memory resources
Write machine independent code program should not
depend on memory architecture.

Permit sharing of memory segments or regions.

For example, read-only code segments should be shared
between program instances.

Operating Systems

Virtual Memory

Operating Systems

Virtual memory
Virtual memory is partitioned in to equal size
pages.
Main memory is also partitions into equal size
page frames.
Size of a page = size of a page frame
Programs are also partitioned into pages at the
time of loading.

Operating Systems

Logical View

Operating Systems

Virtual Memory
Process runs on a virtual machine as defined
by the underlying hardware.
Focus is on Hardware support for a virtual
address space
virtual addresses independent of physical
memory
Key hardware component is the Memory
Management Unit (MMU)
address translation: virtual to physical
memory
ensures virtual address space protection
Operating Systems

Virtual Memory

Page
table
Keep track of
whether a
page is in a
physical
page frame
or not.

Page table may maintain a bit in each entry to indicate

whether the page is in the memory or not.
Operating Systems

Handling missing pages

When a page fault occurs, the Operating
System:
moves the current process to the
blocked/waiting state (since it must wait for a
page to be made resident).
finds an empty frame or, if necessary, makes a
frame empty in main memory by swapping out
a page in the main memory.
determines the location of the requested page
on the paging device.
schedules a disk read operation to load the
page into the selected main memory frame (via
a pagein)
later handles page fetch completion (which9 is
Operating Systems

Using Virtual Memory

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/operating_system/os_virtual_memory.ht
m
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Virtual Addresses

Operating Systems

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Virtual address to Real Address

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Paging Example
Virtual
Memory
Page
0

A
B
C
d

Physical
Memory

Page
table
row 0

1
2
3

Page frame
0

A
B
C
D

C
C
E
f

C
C
E
f

row n

Page frame
3

Page
n

CPU

Operating Systems

MMU

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Using Virtual Memory

Check an internal table for this process, to determine whether the
reference was a valid or it was an invalid memory access.
If the reference was invalid, terminate the process. If it was valid,
but page have not yet brought in, page in the latter.
Find a free frame.
Schedule a disk operation to read the desired page into the newly
allocated frame.
When the disk read is complete, modify the internal table kept
with the process and the page table to indicate that the page is
now in memory.
Restart the instruction that was interrupted by the illegal address
trap. The process can now access the page as though it had
always been in memory. Therefore, the operating system reads
the desired page into memory and restarts the process as though
the page had always been in memory.
Operating Systems

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Virtual Memory - Disadvantages

Space: Translation tables and other data used
by VM system reduce available memory to
programs
Time: Address translation time is added to the
cost (execution time) of each instruction.
Overhead: Memory management operations
have been measured to consume up to 10% of
the CPU time on a busy system.
Efficiency: Allocating memory in pages may
result in fragmentation

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Virtual Memory
Allows programmers to address memory from a logical
point of view
Another layer of indirection

Allow the illusion of operating with a larger memory space

than what is available in reality
By storing some of the information on the file system

Operating Systems

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Device Drivers
Device driver is a software.
The computer communicates
with peripheral devices
through device drivers.
A driver provides a software
interface to hardware devices,
enabling operating systems
and other computer programs
to access hardware functions
without knowing the precise
hardware details.

Operating Systems

Device drivers depends

on both the hardware and
the operating system
loaded in to the computer
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Secondary Storage Management

Secondary storage is the non-volatile repository for both
user and system data and programs.
Secondary storage is typically used to store
Source program
Executable programs
Data for the program
Temporaty data

Operating Systems

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Files
A file is a named collection of related information, usually
a sequence of bytes
A file can be viewed in two different ways.
Logical (programmers) view: how the users see the file.
Liners collection of records.
Image File rows of intensity values
Linear sequence of bytes.

Physical (operating system) view: how the file is stored

on secondary storage.
Many possibilities, not necessarily contiguous

Operating Systems

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File Attributes
Each file has an associated collection of
information(attributes)

file name
Owner
type (e.g., source, data, executable)
location(s) on the secondary storage.
organization (e.g. sequential, indexed, random)
access permissions who is permitted to
read/write/delete data in the file.
time and date of creation, modification, last
access
file size
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File Types
File can be classified into various types
based on the content.

Executable
Text
Source
Library
Compressed
Word Processor
Spread sheet.

One of the possible implementation

technique of file type is to include the type
as an extension to the file name.
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File Access Methods

File access methods describe how the data stored in a file
can be accessed
Sequential: access in order, one record after another.
Direct (random): access in any order, skipping over
uninteresting records
Indexed : access in any order, but based on key value(s)

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Directories
Directories are used to organize file to
logical categories.
A directory is a file that can be searched
for information about other files.
Entries in the directory file are created,
deleted and modified when the files they
describe are create, deleted and modified.

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Unix Directory structure

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File allocation
Common file allocation techniques
Contiguous
Linked
Indexed
Typically the allocation techniques allocate
storage space on the basis of fixed size
addressable units.

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File allocation Contiguous

Allocate disk space as a
collection of
adjacent/contiguous
blocks.
This technique needs to
Directory
keep track of unused disk
space.
File
Name Start
No of
Block No

Blocks

file1

00

03

file2

12

06

file3

20

11

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File allocation Contiguous

Advantages:
Simple easy access.
Easy Access.
Disadvantage
File size is not known at
the time of creation.
Extending file size is
difficult
External fragmentation

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File allocation - Linked

Inside each block a
link is maintained to
point to the next block
of the file
Directory
File Name

Start
Block No

No of
Blocks

file1

00

03

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File allocation - Linked

Advantages:
No external fragmentation.
Files can grow easily.
Disadvantage
Many seek are required to
access file data
Example :
MSDOS FAT file system

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File allocation - Indexed

Creates a table of
pointers(index) at the
time of the file creation.
This table is modified as
new blocks are
allocated for the file or
removed from the file.
The index table is also
saved in a block/s.
Example : UNIX file
system

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Formatting a storage
device
Hard disks, need to be formatted before
using.
Formatting a disk configures the disk
with a file system so that OS can store
information on the disk.

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File Allocation Table(FAT)

FAT is the file systems used by Windows NT
operating system.
FAT uses a file allocation table (FAT) to keep
track of files in the storage devices
FAT and the root directory reside at a fixed
location of the volume so that the system's
boot files can be correctly located.
To protect a volume, two copies of the FAT are
kept.

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New Technology File

System
NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary
file system developed by Microsoft. This is improvement
of FAT. This improvements includes
The capability to recover from some disk-related errors
automatically, which FAT cannot.
Improved support for larger hard disks.
Better security because you can use permissions and
encryption to restrict access to specific files to
approved users.
NTFS is a recoverable file system which keeps track of
transactions against the file system in a log.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/comparing-ntfs-and-fat-filesystems
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Memory Fragmentation
Fragmentation is the unintentional division of
memory into many small free areas that cannot
be used effectively.
External Fragmentation total
memory space exists to satisfy a
request, but it is not contiguous.
Internal Fragmentation allocated
memory may be slightly larger than
requested memory
This size difference is in memory internal
to a partition, hence cannot be used for
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any other process.

Operating Systems

Memory Fragmentation
.
Compaction is a technique that can be used
to deal with (external) fragmentation by moving
partitions to bring many small free areas
together to form a single large free area.

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References
Operating System Concepts by Avi Silberschat, Peter
Baer Galvin and Greg Gagne
http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/OS8/os8c/slide-dir/

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