Memory Management

Every computer has some main memory that it uses to hold executing programs. In a very simple operating system, only one program at a time is in memory. To run a second program, the first one has to be removed and the second one placed in memory.

More sophisticated operating systems allow multiple programs to be in memory at the same time. To keep them from interfering with one another (and with the operating system), some kind of protection mechanism is needed. While this mechanism has to be in the hardware, it is controlled by the operating system.

The above viewpoint is concerned with managing and protecting the computer’s main memory. A different, but equally important memory-related issue, is managing the address space of the processes. Normally, each process has some set of addresses it can use, typically running from 0 up to some maximum. In the simplest case, the maximum amount of address space a process has is less than the main memory. In this way, a process can fill up its address space and there will be enough room in main memory to hold it all.

However, on many computers addresses are 32 or 64 bits, giving an address space of 2³² or 2⁶⁴ bytes, respectively. What happens if a process has more address space than the computer has main memory and the process wants to use it all? In the first computers, such a process was just out of luck. Nowadays, a technique called virtual memory exists, in which the operating system keeps part of the address space in main memory and part on disk and shuttles pieces back and forth between them as needed. This important operating system function, and other memory management-related functions will be covered in Chap.4