Chapter 9: Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne

 Chapter 9: Virtual Memory
● Background
● Demand Paging
● Copy-on-Write
● Page Replacement
● Allocation of Frames
● Thrashing
● Memory-Mapped Files
● Allocating Kernel Memory
● Other Considerations
● Operating-System Examples

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 Objectives

● To describe the benefits of a virtual memory system

● To explain the concepts of demand paging, page-replacement
algorithms, and allocation of page frames
● To discuss the principle of the working-set model
● To examine the relationship between shared memory and
memory-mapped files
● To explore how kernel memory is managed

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 Background
● Code needs to be in memory to execute, but entire program
rarely used. Ex.
● 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
4 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

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 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

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 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

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 Virtual Memory That is Larger Than Physical Memory

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 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
4 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

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 Shared Library Using Virtual Memory

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 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

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 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
4 Without changing program behavior
4 Without programmer needing to change code

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 Valid-Invalid Bit
● With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v ⇒ in-memory – memory resident, i ⇒ not-in-memory)
● Initially valid–invalid bit is set to i on all entries
● Example of a page table snapshot:

● During MMU address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page table

entry is i ⇒ page fault

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 Page Table When Some Pages Are Not in Main Memory

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 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 checks an internal table to determine whether
the reference was a valid or an invalid memory access.
2. If the reference was
1. invalid, terminate the process.
2. valid, but not yet brought, page it in.
3. Find a free frame
4. Swap page into frame via scheduled disk operation
5. Reset tables to indicate page now in memory
Set validation bit = v
6. Restart the instruction that caused the page fault

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 Steps in Handling a Page Fault

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 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

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 Performance of Demand Paging
● Stages in Demand Paging (worse case)
1. Trap to the operating system
2. Save the user registers and process state
3. Determine that the interrupt was a page fault
4. Check that the page reference was legal and determine the location of the page on the disk
5. Issue a read from the disk to a free frame:
1. Wait in a queue for this device until the read request is serviced
2. Wait for the device seek and/or latency time
3. Begin the transfer of the page to a free frame
6. While waiting, allocate the CPU to some other user
7. Receive an interrupt from the disk I/O subsystem (I/O completed)
8. Save the registers and process state for the other user
9. Determine that the interrupt was from the disk
10. Correct the page table and other tables to show page is now in memory
11. Wait for the CPU to be allocated to this process again
12. Restore the user registers, process state, and new page table, and then resume the
interrupted instruction

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 Performance of Demand Paging (Cont.)
● 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 ma + p x page fault time.
= (1 – p) x memory access + p (page fault overhead + swap page out
+ swap page in )

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 Need For Page Replacement

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

3. Continue the process by restarting the instruction that caused

the trap
Note now potentially 2 page transfers for page fault – increasing
EAT

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 Page Replacement

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 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

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 Graph of Page Faults Versus The Number of Frames

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 First-In-First-Out (FIFO) Algorithm
● Reference string: 7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1
● 3 frames (3 pages can be in memory at a time per process)

15 page faults
● Can vary by reference string: consider 1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5
● Adding more frames can cause more page faults!
4 Belady’s Anomaly
● How to track ages of pages?
● Just use a FIFO queue

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 FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

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 Optimal Algorithm
● Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
● 9 is optimal for the example
● How do you know this?
● Can’t read the future
● Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs

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 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?

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 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
4 Search through table needed
● Stack implementation
● Keep a stack of page numbers in a double link form:
● Page referenced:
4 move it to the top
4 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

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 Use Of A Stack to Record Most Recent Page References

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 End of Chapter 9

Operating System Concepts Essentials Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne