Virtual Memory Management Part - I.pdf

Amrita
School
of
Engineering,
Bangalore
Ms. Harika Pudugosula
Lecturer
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering

• Background
• Demand Paging
• Copy-on-Write
• Page Replacement
• Allocation of Frames
• Thrashing
2

Introduction
• Virtual memory is a technique that allows the execution of processes that are not
completely in memory
• One major advantage of this scheme is that programs can be larger than physical
memory
• Virtual memory abstracts main memory into an extremely large, uniform array of
storage, separating logical memory as viewed by the user from physical memory
• This technique frees programmers from the concerns of memory-storage limitations
• Virtual memory also allows processes to share files easily and to implement shared
memory
• In addition, it provides an efficient mechanism for process creation
• Virtual memory is not easy to implement, however, and may substantially decrease
performance if it is used carelessly
3

Objectives
• To describe the benefits of a virtual memory system
• To explain the concepts of demand paging, page-replacement algorithms, and
allocation of page frames
• To discuss the principle of the working-set model
4

Background
5
• Process Code needs to be in memory to execute, but entire process code rarely used
at the same time.
• Error code, unusual routines, large data structures(An assembler/compiler symbol
table may have room for 3,000 symbols, although the average program has less than
200 symbols)
• Entire program code not needed at same time in physical memory
• Virtual memory is a technique that allows the execution of processes that are not
completely in memory
• Benefits of executing a program that is not completely in main memory
• Program no longer constrained by limits of physical memory(Programs can be
larger than physical memory)
• Each program takes less memory while running -> more programs run at the
same time
• Increased CPU utilization and throughput with no increase in response time
or turnaround time
• Less I/O needed to load or swap programs into memory -> each user program
runs faster

Background
7
• Virtual memory involves the separation of logical
memory as perceived by users from physical
memory
• This separation allows an extremely large virtual
memory to be provided for programmers when only
a smaller physical memory is available
• Virtual memory makes the task of programming
much easier, because the programmer no longer
needs to worry about the amount of physical
memory available
• The virtual address space of a process refers to the
logical (or virtual) view of how a process is stored in
memory
• This view is that a process begins at a certain logical
address—say, address 0—and exists in contiguous
memory

Background
8
• In addition to separating logical memory from physical memory, virtual memory
allows files and memory to be shared by two or more processes through page
sharing
• This leads to the following benefits -
• System libraries can be shared by several processes through mapping of the
shared object into a virtual address space. A library is mapped read-only into the
space of each process that is linked with it
• Virtual memory allows one process to create a region of memory that it can
share with another process
• Pages can be shared during process creation with the fork() system call, thus
speeding up process creation

Demand Paging
10
• Consider how an executable program might be loaded from disk into memory
• One option is to load the entire program in physical memory at program execution
time
• May not initially need the entire program in memory
• With Demand-paged virtual memory, pages are loaded only when they are
demanded during program execution
• Pages that are never accessed are thus never loaded into physical memory
• Processes reside in secondary memory (usually a disk), when we want to execute a
process, we swap it into memory
• A lazy swapper never swaps a page into memory unless that page will be needed
• In the context of a demand-paging system, use of the term “swapper” is technically
incorrect
• A swapper manipulates entire processes, whereas a pager is concerned with the
individual pages of a process

Demand Paging
11
Figure. Transfer of a paged memory to contiguous disk space

Basic Concepts
12
• The pager brings only those pages into memory. Thus, it avoids reading into
memory pages that will not be used anyway, decreasing the swap time and the
amount of physical memory needed
• Some form of hardware support to distinguish between the pages that are in
memory and the pages that are on the disk
• When this bit is set to “valid,” the associated page is both legal and in memory
• If the bit is set to “invalid,” the page either is not valid (that is, not in the logical
address space of the process) or is valid but is currently on the disk
• The page-table entry for a page that is brought into memory is set as usual, but the
page-table entry for a page that is not currently in memory is either simply marked
invalid or contains the address of the page on disk
• With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v --> in-memory – memory resident, i --> not-in-memory)
• Initially valid–invalid bit is set to i on all entries

Basic Concepts
13
Figure. Page table when some pages are not in main memory

Basic Concepts
14
• During MMU address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table entry is i -->page
fault
• What happens if the process tries to access a page that was not brought into
memory?
page fault will occur
• Page fault - It occurs when CPU tries to access a page that does not exist in main
memory
• The procedure for handling this page fault is straightforward - (Steps to handle page
fault)
1. We check an internal table (usually kept with the process control block)
for this process to determine whether the reference was a valid or an invalid
memory access
2. If the reference was invalid, we terminate the process. If it was valid but we
have not yet brought in that page, we now page it in

Basic Concepts
15
3. We find a free frame (by taking one from the free-frame list, for example)
4. We schedule a disk operation to read the desired page into the newly allocated
frame
5. When the disk read is complete, we modify the internal table kept with the
process and the page table to indicate that the page is now in memory
6. We restart the instruction that was interrupted by the trap. The process can now
access the page as though it had always been in memory
• After this page is brought into memory, the process continues to execute, faulting as
necessary until every page that it needs is in memory
• At that point, it can execute with no more faults. This scheme is pure demand
paging - never bring a page into memory until it is required
• Some programs could access several new pages of memory with each instruction
execution, possibly causing multiple page faults per instruction - situation would
result in unacceptable system performance
• Programs tend to have locality of reference, which results in reasonable
performance from demand paging

Basic Concepts
16
Figure. Steps in handling a page fault

Basic Concepts
17
• The hardware to support demand paging is the same as the hardware for paging
and swapping -
• Page table -This table has the ability to mark an entry invalid through a valid–
invalid bit or a special value of protection bits
• Secondary memory - This memory holds those pages that are not present in
main memory. The secondary memory is usually a high-speed disk. It is known
as the swap device, and the section of disk used for this purpose is known as
swap space
• A crucial requirement for demand paging is the ability to restart any instruction
after a page fault
• Because we save the state (registers, condition code, instruction counter) of the
interrupted process when the page fault occurs, we must be able to restart the
process in exactly the same place and state, except that the desired page is now in
memory and is accessible
• Consider a three-address instruction such as ADD the content of A to B, placing the
result in C. These are the steps to execute this instruction

Basic Concepts
18
1. Fetch and decode the instruction (ADD).
2. Fetch A.
3. Fetch B.
4. Add A and B.
5. Store the sum in C.
• If we fault when we try to store in C ,we will have to get the desired page, bring it in,
correct the page table, and restart the instruction
• The restart will require fetching the instruction again, decoding it again, fetching the
two operands again, and then adding again
• The repetition is necessary only when a page fault occurs

Performance of Demand Paging
19
• Demand paging can significantly affect the performance of a computer system
• Let’s compute the effective access time for a demand-paged memory
• For most computer systems, the memory-access time, denoted ma, ranges from 10
to 200 nanoseconds
• As long as we have no page faults, the effective access time is equal to the
memory access time
• If a page fault occurs, we must first read the relevant page from disk and then
access the desired word
• Let p be the probability of a page fault (0 ≤ p ≤ 1)
• We would expect p to be close to zero—that is, we would expect to have only a
few page faults
• The effective access time is then
effective access time = (1 − p) × ma + p × page fault time
• To compute the effective access time, we must know how much time is needed to
service a page fault

20
• A page fault causes the following sequence to occur -
1. Trap to the operating system
2. Save the user registers and process state
3. Determine that the interrupt was a page fault
4. Check that the page reference was legal and determine the location of the page
on the disk
5. Issue a read from the disk to a free frame -
a. Wait in a queue for this device until the read request is serviced
b. Wait for the device seek and/or latency time
c. Begin the transfer of the page to a free frame
6. While waiting, allocate the CPU to some other user (CPU scheduling, optional)
7. Receive an interrupt from the disk I/O subsystem (I/O completed)
8. Save the registers and process state for the other user (if step 6 is executed)
9. Determine that the interrupt was from the disk

21
• A page fault causes the following sequence to occur -
10. Correct the page table and other tables to show that the desired page is now in
memory
11. Wait for the CPU to be allocated to this process again.
12. Restore the user registers, process state, and new page table, and then resume
the interrupted instruction
• Three major activities
• Service the interrupt – careful coding means just several hundred instructions
needed
• Read the page – lots of time
• Restart the process – again just a small amount of time
• Page Fault Rate 0 <=p<= 1
• if p = 0 no page faults
• if p = 1, every reference is a fault
• Effective Access Time (EAT)
EAT = (1 – p) x memory access + p (page fault overhead + swap page out + swap page
in)

22
• With an average page-fault service time of 8 milliseconds and a memory access
time of 200 nanoseconds, the effective access time in nanoseconds is
effective access time = (1 − p) × (200) + p (8 milliseconds)
= (1 − p) × 200 + p × 8,000,000
= 200 − 200p + p × 8,000,000
= 200 + 7,999,800 ×p
• If one access out of 1,000 causes a page fault i.e., p=1000, the effective access time
is 8.2 microseconds
• The computer will be slowed down by a factor of 40 because of demand paging
• The effective access time is directly proportional to the page-fault rate
• If we want performance degradation to be less than 10 percent, we need to keep
the probability of page faults at the following level -
220 > 200 + 7,999,800 × p,
20 > 7,999,800 × p,
p < 0.0000025

23
• Demand Paging Optimizations
• Handles and overall use of swap space -
• Disk I/O to swap space is generally faster than that to the file system
• It is a faster file system because swap space is allocated in much larger blocks, and
file lookups and indirect allocation methods are not used

24
References
1. Silberscatnz and Galvin, “Operating System Concepts,” Ninth Edition,
John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

Virtual Memory Management Part - I.pdf

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