UNIT 5 : Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Background
● 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;
● Only part of the program needs to be in memory for execution
● Logical address space can therefore be much larger than
physical address space

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 ● Allows address spaces to be shared by several processes
● Virtual memory can be implemented via:
● Demand paging
● Demand segmentation

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Virtual Memory That is
Larger Than Physical Memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Demand Paging

● Bring a page into memory only when it is needed

Less I/O needed
●
● Less memory needed
● Faster response (no need to wait for all pages to load)
● More users
● Page is needed ⇒ reference to it
● invalid reference ⇒ abort
● not-in-memory ⇒ bring to memory
● Lazy swapper – never swaps a page into memory unless
page will be needed
● Swapper that deals with pages is a pager

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Valid-Invalid Bit
● With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v ⇒ in-memory, i ⇒ not-in-memory)
● Initially valid–invalid bit is set to i on all entries
● Example of a page table snapshot:
Frame # valid-invalid bit
v
v
v
v
i
….
i
i
page table
● During address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table entry
is I ⇒ page fault

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Page Table When Some Pages
Are Not in Main Memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Page Fault

● If there is a reference to a page, first reference to that

page will trap to operating system:
page fault
1. Operating system looks at another table to decide:
● Invalid reference ⇒ abort
● Just not in memory
2. Get empty frame
3. Swap page into frame
4. Reset tables
5. Set validation bit = v
6. Restart the instruction that caused the page fault

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Steps in Handling a Page Fault

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Performance of Demand Paging

● Page Fault Rate 0 ≤ p ≤ 1.0

● 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
+ restart overhead
)(page fault service time)

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Demand Paging Example
● Memory access time = 200 nanoseconds
● Average page-fault service time = 8 milliseconds
● EAT = (1 – p) x 200 + p (8 milliseconds)
= (1 – p x 200 + p x 8,000,000
= 200 + p x 7,999,800

Suppose page fault rate=40%(p)

=0.40

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 What happens if there is no free frame?
● Page replacement – find some page in memory, but not really in
use, swap it out
● algorithm
● performance – want an algorithm which will result in
minimum number of page faults
● Same page may be brought into memory several times

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Page Replacement

● Prevent over-allocation of memory by modifying page-fault

service routine to include page replacement
● Use modify (dirty) bit to reduce overhead of page transfers –
only modified pages are written to disk
● Page replacement completes separation between logical
memory and physical memory – large virtual memory can be
provided on a smaller physical memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Need For Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Basic Page Replacement

1. Find the location of the desired page on disk

2. Find a free frame:
- If there is a free frame, use it
- If there is no free frame, use a page replacement
algorithm to select a victim frame
3. Bring the desired page into the (newly) free frame;
update the page and frame tables
4. Restart the process

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Page Replacement Algorithms

● Want lowest page-fault rate

● Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular
string of memory references (reference string)
and computing the number of page faults on that
string
● In all our examples, the reference string is
1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 First-In-First-Out (FIFO) Algorithm
● Reference string: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
● 3 frames (3 pages can be in memory at a time per process)

1 1
2 2 9 page faults
3 3

1 1
2 2 10 page faults
● 4 frames
3 3

4 4

● Belady’s Anomaly: more frames ⇒ more page faults

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Graph of Expected Page Faults Versus
The Number of Frames

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 FIFO Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Optimal Algorithm

● Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
● 4 frames example
❑ 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

2 6 page faults
3

❑ Unfortunately, the optimal page-replacement algorithm is

difficult to implement, because it requires future knowledge of
the reference string
● Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs
Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Optimal Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Least Recently Used (LRU) Algorithm
● we can replace the page that has not been used for the longest
period of time
1 1 1 1 5
●
2 2 2 2 2
3 5 5 4 4
4 4 3 3 3

● Reference string: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 LRU Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Global vs. Local Allocation

● With multiple processes competing for frames, we can

classify page-replacement algorithms into two broad
categories: Global and local Replacement
● Global replacement – process selects a replacement
frame from the set of all frames,even if that frame is
currently allocated to some other process; that is, one
process can take a frame from another.
● Local replacement – each process selects from only its
own set of allocated frames

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Thrashing
● If a process does not have “enough” pages in MM, the
page-fault rate is very high. This leads to:
● low CPU utilization
● operating system thinks that it needs to increase the
degree of multiprogramming
● another process added to the system
Cause of Thrashing
● High page fault rate is trashing
● Trashing occur because of increasing of degree of
multiprogramming
● a process is busy swapping pages in and out
● Lack of Frames

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Thrashing (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Recovery of trashing
●Instruct the long term scheduler not to bring the processes into
the memory after particular threshold
●Instruct the medium term scheduler to suspend some of the
processes so that we can recover the system from thrashing
●Increase the size of Main memory

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition 9.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009