Operating System - Memory Management

Memory management is the functionality of an operating system which handles or

manages primary memory and moves processes back and forth between main memory
and disk during execution. Memory management keeps track of each and every
memory location, regardless of either it is allocated to some process or it is free. It
checks how much memory is to be allocated to processes. It decides which process will
get memory at what time. It tracks whenever some memory gets freed or unallocated
and correspondingly it updates the status.

This tutorial will teach you basic concepts related to Memory Management.

Process Address Space

The process address space is the set of logical addresses that a process references in
its code. For example, when 32-bit addressing is in use, addresses can range from 0 to
0x7fffffff; that is, 2^31 possible numbers, for a total theoretical size of 2 gigabytes.

The operating system takes care of mapping the logical addresses to physical addresses
at the time of memory allocation to the program. There are three types of addresses
used in a program before and after memory is allocated −

Virtual and physical addresses are the same in compile-time and load-time address-
binding schemes. Virtual and physical addresses differ in execution-time address-
binding scheme.

The set of all logical addresses generated by a program is referred to as a logical

address space. The set of all physical addresses corresponding to these logical
addresses is referred to as a physical address space.

The runtime mapping from virtual to physical address is done by the memory
management unit (MMU) which is a hardware device. MMU uses following mechanism
to convert virtual address to physical address.

The value in the base register is added to every address generated by a user
process, which is treated as offset at the time it is sent to memory. For example,
 if the base register value is 10000, then an attempt by the user to use address
location 100 will be dynamically reallocated to location 10100.

The user program deals with virtual addresses; it never sees the real physical
addresses.

Static vs Dynamic Loading

The choice between Static or Dynamic Loading is to be made at the time of computer
program being developed. If you have to load your program statically, then at the time
of compilation, the complete programs will be compiled and linked without leaving any
external program or module dependency. The linker combines the object program with
other necessary object modules into an absolute program, which also includes logical
addresses.

If you are writing a Dynamically loaded program, then your compiler will compile the
program and for all the modules which you want to include dynamically, only references
will be provided and rest of the work will be done at the time of execution.

At the time of loading, with static loading, the absolute program (and data) is loaded
into memory in order for execution to start.

If you are using dynamic loading, dynamic routines of the library are stored on a disk
in relocatable form and are loaded into memory only when they are needed by the
program.

Static vs Dynamic Linking

As explained above, when static linking is used, the linker combines all other modules
needed by a program into a single executable program to avoid any runtime
dependency.

When dynamic linking is used, it is not required to link the actual module or library with
the program, rather a reference to the dynamic module is provided at the time of
compilation and linking. Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) in Windows and Shared Objects
in Unix are good examples of dynamic libraries.

Swapping
Swapping is a mechanism in which a process can be swapped temporarily out of main
memory (or move) to secondary storage (disk) and make that memory available to
other processes. At some later time, the system swaps back the process from the
secondary storage to main memory.

Though performance is usually affected by swapping process but it helps in running

multiple and big processes in parallel and that's the reason Swapping is also known
as a technique for memory compaction.

The total time taken by swapping process includes the time it takes to move the entire
process to a secondary disk and then to copy the process back to memory, as well as
the time the process takes to regain main memory.

Let us assume that the user process is of size 2048KB and on a standard hard disk
where swapping will take place has a data transfer rate around 1 MB per second. The
actual transfer of the 1000K process to or from memory will take
 2048KB / 1024KB per second
= 2 seconds
= 2000 milliseconds

Now considering in and out time, it will take complete 4000 milliseconds plus other
overhead where the process competes to regain main memory.

Memory Allocation
Main memory usually has two partitions −

Low Memory − Operating system resides in this memory.

High Memory − User processes are held in high memory.

Operating system uses the following memory allocation mechanism.

Fragmentation
As processes are loaded and removed from memory, the free memory space is broken
into little pieces. It happens after sometimes that processes cannot be allocated to
memory blocks considering their small size and memory blocks remains unused. This
problem is known as Fragmentation.

Fragmentation is of two types −

The following diagram shows how fragmentation can cause waste of memory and a
compaction technique can be used to create more free memory out of fragmented
memory −
External fragmentation can be reduced by compaction or shuffle memory contents to
place all free memory together in one large block. To make compaction feasible,
relocation should be dynamic.

The internal fragmentation can be reduced by effectively assigning the smallest

partition but large enough for the process.

Paging
A computer can address more memory than the amount physically installed on the
system. This extra memory is actually called virtual memory and it is a section of a
hard that's set up to emulate the computer's RAM. Paging technique plays an important
role in implementing virtual memory.

Paging is a memory management technique in which process address space is broken

into blocks of the same size called pages (size is power of 2, between 512 bytes and
8192 bytes). The size of the process is measured in the number of pages.

Similarly, main memory is divided into small fixed-sized blocks of (physical) memory
called frames and the size of a frame is kept the same as that of a page to have
optimum utilization of the main memory and to avoid external fragmentation.
Address Translation

Page address is called logical address and represented by page number and the
offset.

Logical Address = Page number + page offset

Frame address is called physical address and represented by a frame number and
the offset.

Physical Address = Frame number + page offset

A data structure called page map table is used to keep track of the relation between a
page of a process to a frame in physical memory.
When the system allocates a frame to any page, it translates this logical address into a
physical address and create entry into the page table to be used throughout execution
of the program.

When a process is to be executed, its corresponding pages are loaded into any available
memory frames. Suppose you have a program of 8Kb but your memory can
accommodate only 5Kb at a given point in time, then the paging concept will come into
picture. When a computer runs out of RAM, the operating system (OS) will move idle or
unwanted pages of memory to secondary memory to free up RAM for other processes
and brings them back when needed by the program.

This process continues during the whole execution of the program where the OS keeps
removing idle pages from the main memory and write them onto the secondary
memory and bring them back when required by the program.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Paging

Here is a list of advantages and disadvantages of paging −

Paging reduces external fragmentation, but still suffer from internal

fragmentation.

Paging is simple to implement and assumed as an efficient memory

management technique.
Due to equal size of the pages and frames, swapping becomes very easy.
 Page table requires extra memory space, so may not be good for a system
having small RAM.

Segmentation
Segmentation is a memory management technique in which each job is divided into
several segments of different sizes, one for each module that contains pieces that
perform related functions. Each segment is actually a different logical address space of
the program.

When a process is to be executed, its corresponding segmentation are loaded into non-
contiguous memory though every segment is loaded into a contiguous block of
available memory.

Segmentation memory management works very similar to paging but here segments
are of variable-length where as in paging pages are of fixed size.

A program segment contains the program's main function, utility functions, data
structures, and so on. The operating system maintains a segment map table for
every process and a list of free memory blocks along with segment numbers, their size
and corresponding memory locations in main memory. For each segment, the table
stores the starting address of the segment and the length of the segment. A reference
to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset.