COA

VIRTUAL MEMORY /
MEMORY MANAGEMENT

DAY – 2

01/12/2024
TOPICS
• Background
• Demand Paging
• Copy-on-Write
• Page Replacement (LRU,MFU)
• Allocation of Frames
• Thrashing
• Memory-Mapped Files
BACKGROUND
• Code needs to be in memory to execute, but entire program rarely used
• Error code, unusual routines, large data structures

• Entire program code not needed at same time

• Consider ability to execute partially-loaded program
• Program no longer constrained by limits of 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 (CONT.)
• Virtual memory – separation of user logical memory from physical
memory
• Only part of the program needs to be in memory for execution
• Logical address space can therefore be much larger than physical address space
• Allows address spaces to be shared by several processes
• Allows for more efficient process creation
• More programs running concurrently
• Less I/O needed to load or swap processes
BACKGROUND (CONT.)
• Virtual address space – logical view of how process is stored in memory
• Usually start at address 0, contiguous addresses until end of space
• Meanwhile, physical memory organized in page frames
• MMU must map logical to physical

• Virtual memory can be implemented via:

• Demand paging
• Demand segmentation
VIRTUAL MEMORY THAT IS LARGER THAN PHYSICAL MEMORY
VIRTUAL-ADDRESS SPACE
Usually design logical address space for stack to start
at Max logical address and grow “down” while heap
grows “up”
Maximizes address space use
Unused address space between the two is hole
 No physical memory needed until heap or
stack grows to a given new page
Enables sparse address spaces with holes left for
growth, dynamically linked libraries, etc
System libraries shared via mapping into virtual
address space
Shared memory by mapping pages read-write into
virtual address space
Pages can be shared during fork(), speeding
process creation
SHARED LIBRARY USING VIRTUAL MEMORY
DEMAND PAGING
• Could bring entire process into memory at load time
• Or bring a page into memory only when it is needed
• Less I/O needed, no unnecessary I/O
• Less memory needed
• Faster response
• More users
• Similar to paging system with swapping (diagram on right)
• 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
BASIC CONCEPTS
• With swapping, pager guesses which pages will be used before swapping out again

• Instead, pager brings in only those pages into memory

• How to determine that set of pages?

• Need new MMU functionality to implement demand paging

• If pages needed are already memory resident

• No difference from non demand-paging

• If page needed and not memory resident

• Need to detect and load the page into memory from storage

• Without changing program behavior

• Without programmer needing to change code

PAGE TABLE WHEN SOME PAGES ARE NOT IN MAIN MEMORY
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. Find free frame
3. Swap page into frame via scheduled disk operation
4. Reset tables to indicate page now in memory
Set validation bit = v
5. Restart the instruction that caused the page fault
STEPS IN HANDLING A PAGE FAULT
ASPECTS OF DEMAND PAGING
• Extreme case – start process with no pages in memory
• OS sets instruction pointer to first instruction of process, non-memory-resident -> page fault
• And for every other process pages on first access
• Pure demand paging

• Actually, a given instruction could access multiple pages -> multiple page faults
• Consider fetch and decode of instruction which adds 2 numbers from memory and stores result back to
memory
• Pain decreased because of locality of reference

• Hardware support needed for demand paging

• Page table with valid / invalid bit
• Secondary memory (swap device with swap space)
• Instruction restart
PERFORMANCE OF DEMAND PAGING
• 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 )
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
• If one access out of 1,000 causes a page fault, then
EAT = 8.2 microseconds.
This is a slowdown by a factor of 40!!
• If want performance degradation < 10 percent
• 220 > 200 + 7,999,800 x p
20 > 7,999,800 x p
• p < .0000025
• < one page fault in every 400,000 memory accesses
DEMAND PAGING OPTIMIZATIONS
• Swap space I/O faster than file system I/O even if on the same device
• Swap allocated in larger chunks, less management needed than file system
• Copy entire process image to swap space at process load time
• Then page in and out of swap space
• Used in older BSD Unix
• Demand page in from program binary on disk, but discard rather than paging out when freeing frame
• Used in Solaris and current BSD
• Still need to write to swap space
• Pages not associated with a file (like stack and heap) – anonymous memory
• Pages modified in memory but not yet written back to the file system
• Mobile systems
• Typically don’t support swapping
• Instead, demand page from file system and reclaim read-only pages (such as code)
COPY-ON-WRITE
• Copy-on-Write (COW) allows both parent and child processes to initially share the same pages
in memory
• If either process modifies a shared page, only then is the page copied
• COW allows more efficient process creation as only modified pages are copied
• In general, free pages are allocated from a pool of zero-fill-on-demand pages
• Pool should always have free frames for fast demand page execution
• Don’t want to have to free a frame as well as other processing on page fault
• Why zero-out a page before allocating it?
• vfork() variation on fork() system call has parent suspend and child using copy-on-write
address space of parent
• Designed to have child call exec()
• Very efficient
BEFORE PROCESS 1 MODIFIES PAGE C
AFTER PROCESS 1 MODIFIES PAGE C
WHAT HAPPENS IF THERE IS NO FREE FRAME?

• Used up by process pages

• Also in demand from the kernel, I/O buffers, etc
• How much to allocate to each?
• Page replacement – find some page in memory, but not really in use, page
it out
• Algorithm – terminate? swap out? replace the page?
• Performance – want an algorithm which will result in minimum number of page
faults

• Same page may be brought into memory several times

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
NEED FOR PAGE REPLACEMENT
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
- Write victim frame to disk if dirty

3. Bring the desired page into the (newly) free frame; update the page and frame tables

4. Continue the process by restarting the instruction that caused the trap

Note now potentially 2 page transfers for page fault – increasing EAT
PAGE REPLACEMENT
PAGE AND FRAME REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS

• Frame-allocation algorithm determines

• How many frames to give each process
• Which frames to replace

• Page-replacement algorithm
• Want lowest page-fault rate on both first access and re-access

• Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular string of memory references (reference string) and
computing the number of page faults on that string
• String is just page numbers, not full addresses
• Repeated access to the same page does not cause a page fault
• Results depend on number of frames available

• In all our examples, the reference string of referenced page numbers is

7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1
LEAST RECENTLY USED (LRU) ALGORITHM
• Use past knowledge rather than future
• Replace page that has not been used in the most amount of time
• Associate time of last use with each page

• 12 faults – better than FIFO but worse than OPT

• Generally good algorithm and frequently used
• But how to implement?
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU IMPLEMENTATION
LRU ALGORITHM (CONT.)
• Counter implementation
• Every page entry has a counter; every time page is referenced through this entry, copy the clock into the counter
• When a page needs to be changed, look at the counters to find smallest value
• Search through table needed

• Stack implementation
• Keep a stack of page numbers in a double link form:
• Page referenced:
• move it to the top
• requires 6 pointers to be changed

• But each update more expensive

• No search for replacement

• LRU and OPT are cases of stack algorithms that don’t have Belady’s Anomaly
USE OF A STACK TO RECORD MOST RECENT PAGE REFERENCES
LRU APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS
• LRU needs special hardware and still slow
• Reference bit
• With each page associate a bit, initially = 0
• When page is referenced bit set to 1
• Replace any with reference bit = 0 (if one exists)
• We do not know the order, however
• Second-chance algorithm
• Generally FIFO, plus hardware-provided reference bit
• Clock replacement
• If page to be replaced has
• Reference bit = 0 -> replace it
• reference bit = 1 then:
• set reference bit 0, leave page in memory
• replace next page, subject to same rules
SECOND-CHANCE (CLOCK) PAGE-REPLACEMENT ALGORITHM
COUNTING ALGORITHMS
• Keep a counter of the number of references that have been made to each page
• Not common

• Lease Frequently Used (LFU) Algorithm: replaces page with smallest count

• Most Frequently Used (MFU) Algorithm: based on the argument that the
page with the smallest count was probably just brought in and has yet to be
used
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
MFU IMPLEMENTATION
GLOBAL VS. LOCAL ALLOCATION
• Global replacement – process selects a replacement frame from the set of
all frames; one process can take a frame from another
• But then process execution time can vary greatly
• But greater throughput so more common

• Local replacement – each process selects from only its own set of
allocated frames
• More consistent per-process performance
• But possibly underutilized memory
NON-UNIFORM MEMORY ACCESS
• So far all memory accessed equally
• Many systems are NUMA – speed of access to memory varies
• Consider system boards containing CPUs and memory, interconnected over a system bus

• Optimal performance comes from allocating memory “close to” the CPU on which the
thread is scheduled
• And modifying the scheduler to schedule the thread on the same system board when possible
• Solved by Solaris by creating lgroups
• Structure to track CPU / Memory low latency groups
• Used my schedule and pager
• When possible schedule all threads of a process and allocate all memory for that process within the
lgroup
THRASHING
• If a process does not have “enough” pages, the page-fault rate is very high
• Page fault to get page
• Replace existing frame
• But quickly need replaced frame back
• This leads to:
• Low CPU utilization
• Operating system thinking that it needs to increase the degree of multiprogramming
• Another process added to the system

• Thrashing  a process is busy swapping pages in and out

THRASHING (CONT.)
DEMAND PAGING AND THRASHING
• Why does demand paging work?
Locality model
• Process migrates from one locality to another
• Localities may overlap

• Why does thrashing occur?

 size of locality > total memory size
• Limit effects by using local or priority page replacement
LOCALITY IN A MEMORY-REFERENCE PATTERN
WORKING-SET MODEL
•   working-set window  a fixed number of page references
Example: 10,000 instructions
• WSSi (working set of Process Pi) =
total number of pages referenced in the most recent  (varies in time)
• if  too small will not encompass entire locality
• if  too large will encompass several localities
• if  =   will encompass entire program
• D =  WSSi  total demand frames
• Approximation of locality
• if D > m  Thrashing
• Policy if D > m, then suspend or swap out one of the processes
KEEPING TRACK OF THE WORKING SET
• Approximate with interval timer + a reference bit
• Example:  = 10,000
• Timer interrupts after every 5000 time units
• Keep in memory 2 bits for each page
• Whenever a timer interrupts copy and sets the values of all reference bits to 0
• If one of the bits in memory = 1  page in working set

• Why is this not completely accurate?

• Improvement = 10 bits and interrupt every 1000 time units
PAGE-FAULT FREQUENCY
• More direct approach than WSS
• Establish “acceptable” page-fault frequency (PFF) rate and use local
replacement policy
• If actual rate too low, process loses frame
• If actual rate too high, process gains frame
WORKING SETS AND PAGE FAULT RATES
n Direct relationship between working set of a process and its page-fault
rate

n Working set changes over time

n Peaks and valleys over time

MEMORY-MAPPED FILES
• Memory-mapped file I/O allows file I/O to be treated as routine memory access by mapping a
disk block to a page in memory
• A file is initially read using demand paging
• A page-sized portion of the file is read from the file system into a physical page
• Subsequent reads/writes to/from the file are treated as ordinary memory accesses
• Simplifies and speeds file access by driving file I/O through memory rather than read() and
write() system calls
• Also allows several processes to map the same file allowing the pages in memory to be shared
• But when does written data make it to disk?
• Periodically and / or at file close() time
• For example, when the pager scans for dirty pages
MEMORY-MAPPED FILE TECHNIQUE FOR ALL I/O

• Some OSes uses memory mapped files for standard I/O

• Process can explicitly request memory mapping a file via mmap() system call
• Now file mapped into process address space
• For standard I/O (open(), read(), write(), close()), mmap anyway
• But map file into kernel address space
• Process still does read() and write()
• Copies data to and from kernel space and user space
• Uses efficient memory management subsystem
• Avoids needing separate subsystem
• COW can be used for read/write non-shared pages
• Memory mapped files can be used for shared memory (although again via separate system
calls)
MEMORY MAPPED FILES
SHARED MEMORY VIA MEMORY-MAPPED I/O
THANK
YOU

Raghu Babu Gangolu

Senior Software Engineer, INFOR
Ph: 9886753777
[email protected]