Demand Paging

Consider how an executable program might be loaded from disk into memory. One option is to load the entire program in physical memory at program execution time. However, a problem with this approach is that we may not initially need the entire program in memory. Suppose a program starts with a list of available options from which the user is to select. Loading the entire program into memory results in loading the executable code for all options, regardless of whether or not an option is ultimately selected by the user.

An alternative strategy is to load pages only as they are needed. This technique is known as demand paging and is commonly used in virtual memory systems. With demand-paged virtual memory, pages are loaded only when they are demanded during program execution. Pages that are never accessed are thus never loaded into physical memory.

A demand-paging system is similar to a paging system with swapping (Figure 9.4) where processes reside in secondary memory (usually a disk). When we want to execute a process, we swap it into memory. Rather than swapping the entire process into memory, though, we use a lazy swapper. A lazy swapper never swaps a page into memory unless that page will be needed. In the context of a demand-paging system, use of the term “swapper” is technically incorrect. A swapper manipulates entire processes, whereas a pageris concerned with the individual pages of a process. We thus use “pager,” rather than “swapper,” in connection with demand paging.