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 disk that's set up to emulate the computer's RAM.

The main visible advantage of this scheme is that programs can be larger than physical memory. Virtual memory serves two purposes. First, it allows us to extend the use of physical memory by using disk. Second, it allows us to have memory protection, because each virtual address is translated to a physical address.

Following are the situations, when entire program is not required to be loaded fully in main memory.

• User written error handling routines are used only when an error occurred in the data or computation.

• Certain options and features of a program may be used rarely.

• Many tables are assigned a fixed amount of address space even though only a small amount of the table is actually used.

• The ability to execute a program that is only partially in memory would counter many benefits.

• Less number of I/O would be needed to load or swap each user program into memory.

• A program would no longer be constrained by the amount of physical memory that is available.

• Each user program could take less physical memory, more programs could be run the same time, with a corresponding increase in CPU utilization and throughput.

Modern microprocessors intended for general-purpose use, a memory management unit, or MMU, is built into the hardware. The MMU's job is to translate virtual addresses into physical addresses. A basic example is given below −

Virtual memory is commonly implemented by demand paging. It can also be implemented in a segmentation system. Demand segmentation can also be used to provide virtual memory.

Demand Paging

A demand paging system is quite similar to a paging system with swapping where processes reside in secondary memory and pages are loaded only on demand, not in advance.

When a context switch occurs, the operating system does not copy any of the old program’s pages out to the disk or any of the new program’s pages into the main memory Instead, it just begins executing the new program after loading the first page and fetches that program’s pages as they are referenced.

While executing a program, if the program references a page which is not available in the main memory because it was swapped out a little ago, the processor treats this invalid memory reference as a page fault and transfers control from the program to the operating system to demand the page back into the memory.

Page Fault

A page fault occurs when a program attempts to access a block of memory that is not stored in the physical memory, or RAM. The fault notifies the operating system that it must locate the data in virtual memory, then transfer it from the storage device, such as an HDD or SSD, to the system RAM.

Though the term "page fault" sounds like an error, page faults are common and are part of the normal way computers handle virtual memory. In programming terms, a page fault generates an exception, which notifies the operating system that it must retrieve the memory blocks or "pages" from virtual memory in order for the program to continue.

Once the data is moved into physical memory, the program continues as normal. This process takes place in the background and usually goes unnoticed by the user.

Most page faults are handled without any problems. However, an invalid page fault may cause a program to hang or crash. This type of page fault may occur when a program tries to access a memory address that does not exist. Some programs can handle these types of errors by finding a new memory address or relocating the data. However, if the program cannot handle the invalid page fault, it will get passed to the operating system, which may terminate the process.

This can cause the program to unexpectedly quit.While page faults are common when working with virtual memory, each page fault requires transferring data from secondary memory to primary memory. This process may only take a few milliseconds, but that can still be several thousand times slower than accessing data directly from memory.

Therefore, installing more system memory can increase your computer's performance, since it will need to access virtual memory less often.

Advantages

Following are the advantages of Demand Paging:

• Large virtual memory.

• More efficient use of memory.

• There is no limit on degree of multiprogramming.

Disadvantages

• Number of tables and the amount of processor overhead for handling page interrupts are greater than in the case of the simple paged management techniques.

Page Replacement Algorithm

Page replacement algorithms are the techniques using which an Operating System decides which memory pages to swap out, write to disk when a page of memory needs to be allocated. Paging happens whenever a page fault occurs and a free page cannot be used for allocation purpose accounting to reason that pages are not available or the number of free pages is lower than required pages.

A page replacement algorithm looks at the limited information about accessing the pages provided by hardware, and tries to select which pages should be replaced to minimize the total number of page misses, while balancing it with the costs of primary storage and processor time of the algorithm itself. There are many different page replacement algorithms. We evaluate an algorithm by running it on a particular string of memory reference and computing the number of page faults.

Reference String

The string of memory references is called reference string. Reference strings are generated artificially or by tracing a given system and recording the address of each memory reference.

The latter choice produces a large number of data, where we note two things.

1. For a given page size, we need to consider only the page number, not the entire address.

2. If we have a reference to a page p, then any immediately following references to page p will never cause a page fault. Page p will be in memory after the first reference; the immediately following references will not fault.