VIRTUAL MEMORY

Manideep-16ECE017

Computer Architecture and Organization

National Institute of Technology GOA

May 10, 2020

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VIRTUAL MEMORY Institute of Technology GOA) May 10, 2020 1 / 15
 Outline

1 Introduction

2 Concept of Virtual Memory

3 Virtual Memory

4 First - In - First - Out (FIFO)

5 Least Recently Used (LRU)

6 Advantages of Virtual Memory

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 Introduction

The term virtual memory refers to something which appears to be

present but actually it is not.
The virtual memory technique allows users to use more memory for a
program than the real memory of a computer.
Virtual memory is the concept that gives the illusion to the user that
they will have main memory equal to the capacity of secondary
storage media.

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 Concept of Virtual Memory

A programmer can write a program which requires more memory

space than the capacity of the main memory. Such a program is
executed by virtual memory technique.
The program is stored in the secondary memory. The memory
management unit (MMU) transfers the currently needed part of the
program from the secondary memory to the main memory for
execution.
This to and fro movement of instructions and data (parts of a
program) between the main memory and the secondary memory is
called Swapping.

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 Address Space And Memory Space

Virtual address is the address used by the programmer and the set of
such addresses is called the address space or virtual memory.
An address in main memory is called a location or physical address.
The set of such locations in main memory is called the memory space
or physical memory.
Memory management unit(MMU) controls the virtual memory. The
Address translation is done by MMU.

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 Virtual Memory

Fig1: Virtual Memory

Ref: https://docs.paperspace.com/machine-learning/wiki/recurrent-
neural-network-rnn
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 CPU generated logical address consisting of a logical page number
plus the location within that page (x).
It must be mapped onto an actual (physical) main memory address by
the operating system using mapper.
If the page is present in the main memory, CPU gets the requires data
from the main memory.
If the mapper detects that the requested page is not present in main
memory, a page fault occurs and the page must be read from
secondary storage (4, 5) into a page frame in main memory.

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 Address Mapping

When the requested page is not available in the main memory, we can
say that a page fault have been occurred in the main memory.
Then the virtual address generated by the CPU is used to take out
the requested page from the secondary storage media to the main
memory to remove this page fault.
If empty page frame is not available, then a page must be removed
from page frame in main memory.

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 Page Replacement Algorithms

In a computer operating system that uses paging for virtual memory

management, page replacement algorithms decide which memory
pages to page out (swap out, write to disk) when a page of memory
needs to be allocated.
Paging happens when a page fault occurs and a free page cannot be
used to satisfy the allocation, either because there are none, or
because the number of free pages is lower than some threshold.

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 First - In - First - Out (FIFO)

First-in-first-out is very easy to implement. The FIFO algorithm

selects the page for replacement that has been in memory the longest
time.
When a new page must be loaded, the page recently brought in is
removed. The page to be removed is easily determined because its
identification number is at the top of the FIFO stack.
The FIFO replacement policy has the advantage of being easy to
implement.
It has the disadvantage that under certain circumstances pages are
removed and loaded from memory too frequently.

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 Consider a paging of paging capacity 3.
pages are executed in the following sequence
P2 P3 P2 P1 P5 P2 P4 P5 P3 P2 P5 P2

Fig2: LRU of page size 3

Ref: Computer Architecture by A.P.Godse

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 Least Recently Used (LRU)

The least recently used page (LRU) replacement algorithm keeps

track of page usage over a short period of time.
The LRU algorithm can be implemented by associating a counter with
every page that is in main memory.
When a page is referenced, its associated counter is set to 0. At fixed
intervals of time, the counters associated with all pages presently in
memory are incremented by 1.
The least recently used page is the page with the highest count. The
counters are often called aging registers, as their count indicates their
age, that is, how long their associated pages have been referenced.

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 Advantages of Virtual Memory

Program size is not limited by physical memory size.

The user need not estimate memory allocation.
Manual folding is eliminated to run large programs.
Program can be be loaded in any area of physical memory since the
program does not use physical address.

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 References

1 Computer Architecture and organization by John . P. Hayes

2

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/operatings ystem/osv irtualm emory .htm

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 THANK YOU

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