Module 4B: Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Module 4B: Virtual Memory
● Virtual Memory:Demand Paging- Page
● Replacement Algorithm. Secondary Storage: Disk Scheduling-
● Disk Management- RAID
● Background
● Demand Paging
● Copy-on-Write
● Page Replacement
● Allocation of Frames
● Thrashing

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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
● Program and programs could be larger than physical memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Overlays
● Overlay memory management technique allows multiple programs to be loaded into memory simultaneously,
but only a portion of each program is resident in memory at any given time.
● Increase the overall memory utilization
● Swaps different parts of the programs in and out of memory as required.
● Overlay memory management technique is one such that can be used to allocate and manage memory in your
computer systems efficiently.
Disadvantage :
● Overlays are manually managed by the programmer, while virtual memory is managed by the
operating system, allowing programs to access more memory than physically available.
● Used in older systems with limited memory capacity
● Virtual memory makes application programming easier by hiding fragmentation of physical memory; by
delegating to the kernel the burden of managing the memory hierarchy (eliminating the need for the program to
handle overlays explicitly);
● Virtual memory is widely used in modern operating systems to allow programs to run smoothly even when RAM is
limited.

● While virtual memory allows for larger programs, accessing data on disk is slower than accessing data in

RAM, potentially leading to performance degradation if the system relies heavily on virtual memory.
Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Background
● 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

● Virtual memory can be implemented via:

● Demand paging
● Demand segmentation

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Virtual Memory That is
Larger Than Physical Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Virtual-address Space

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Virtual Address Space
● 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Shared Library Using Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

● 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 Essentials – 8th Edition 9.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Transfer of a Paged Memory to
Contiguous Disk Space

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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:

valid-invalid
Frame #
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 Essentials – 8th Edition 9.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Page Table When Some Pages
Are Not in Main Memory

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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
● 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Steps in Handling a Page Fault

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Performance of Demand Paging
● Stages in Demand Paging
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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Performance of Demand Paging (Cont.)
● 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
+ restart overhead )

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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 p=1/1000
EAT = 8.2 microseconds =8.2 x 103
This is a slowdown by a factor of 40!!

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Cont…
Effective Access Time (with page faults) =
Page fault rate x { Effective Access time without page fault + Page fault service time }
(1 - Page fault rate) x { Effective Access time without page fault }
Question:
Let the page fault service time be 10 ms in a computer with average memory access time
being 20 ns. If one page fault is generated for every 106 memory accesses, what is the
effective access time for the memory?
1. 21 ns
2. 30 ns
3. 23 ns
4. 35 ns

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Cont…
It is given that effective memory access time without page fault = 20 ns.

Now, substituting values in the above formula, we get-

Effective access time with page fault
= 10-6 x { 20 ns + 10 ms } + ( 1 – 10-6 ) x { 20 ns }
= 10-6 x 10 ms + 20 ns
= 10-5 ms + 20 ns
= 10 ns + 20 ns
= 30 ns
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Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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 Essentials – 8th Edition 9.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Need For Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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
● In all our examples, the reference string is
7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Graph of Page Faults Versus
The Number of Frames

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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)

1 7 2 4 0 7

2 0 3 2 1 0 15 page faults

3 1 0 3 2 1

● 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!
Belady’s Anomaly

● How to track ages of pages?

● Just use a FIFO queue

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 FIFO Page Replacement

Page faults=15

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Another example-FIFO

To illustrate problem with FIFO, find page faults with the following string using 3
and 4 frames both

1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5

Page faults (3 frames)- 9

Page faults (4 frames)- 10

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Optimal Algorithm
● Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
● 9 is optimal for the example on the next slide

● How do you know this?

● Can’t read the future

● Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Optimal Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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?

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Use Of A Stack to Record The
Most Recent Page References

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Second-Chance (clock) Page-Replacement Algorithm

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Counting Algorithms
● Keep a counter of the number of references that have been made to each page
● Not common

● LFU Algorithm: replaces page with smallest count

● MFU Algorithm: based on the argument that the page with the smallest count was probably just brought
in and has yet to be used

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Page-Buffering Algorithms
● Keep a pool of free frames, always
● Then frame available when needed, not found at fault time
● Read page into free frame and select victim to evict and add to free pool
● When convenient, evict victim
● Possibly, keep list of modified pages
● When backing store otherwise idle, write pages there and set to non-dirty
● Possibly, keep free frame contents intact and note what is in them
● If referenced again before reused, no need to load contents again from disk
● Generally useful to reduce penalty if wrong victim frame selected

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.42 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Applications and Page Replacement
● All of these algorithms have OS guessing about future page access
● Some applications have better knowledge – i.e. databases
● Memory intensive applications can cause double buffering
● OS keeps copy of page in memory as I/O buffer
● Application keeps page in memory for its own work
● Operating system can given direct access to the disk, getting out of the way of the applications
● Raw disk mode
● Bypasses buffering, locking, etc

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.43 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Allocation of Frames

● Each process needs minimum number of frames

● Example: IBM 370 – 6 pages to handle SS MOVE instruction:
● instruction is 6 bytes, might span 2 pages
● 2 pages to handle from
● 2 pages to handle to
● Maximum of course is total frames in the system
● Two major allocation schemes
● fixed allocation
● priority allocation
● Many variations

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Fixed Allocation
● Equal allocation – For example, if there are 100 frames (after allocating frames for the OS) and 5
processes, give each process 20 frames
● Keep some as free frame buffer pool

● Proportional allocation – Allocate according to the size of process

● Dynamic as degree of multiprogramming, process sizes change

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Priority Allocation
● Use a proportional allocation scheme using priorities rather than size

● If process Pi generates a page fault,

● select for replacement one of its frames
● select for replacement a frame from a process with lower priority number

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.48 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 Thrashing (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.49 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 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?

Σ size of locality > total memory size
● Limit effects by using local or priority page replacement

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition 9.50 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011
 End of Chapter 4B

Operating System Concepts Essentials – 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2011