Chapter 10: Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts – 10 th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018

 Chapter 10: 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

Operating System Concepts – 10 th Edition 10.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives

▪ Define virtual memory and describe its benefits.

▪ Illustrate how pages are loaded into memory using demand paging.
▪ Apply the FIFO, optimal, and LRU page-replacement algorithms.
▪ Describe the working set of a process, and explain how it is related to
program locality.
▪ Describe how Linux, Windows 10, and Solaris manage virtual memory.
▪ Design a virtual memory manager simulation in the C programming
language.

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 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
• Each program takes less memory while running -> more programs
run at the same time
 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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 Virtual memory

▪ 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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 Virtual memory (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

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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
 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
▪ Good example (Link)

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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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 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)

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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
 Without changing program behavior
 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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 Steps in Handling Page Fault

1. If there is a reference to a page, first reference to that page will trap to

operating system
• Page fault
2. Operating system looks at another table to decide:
• Invalid reference  abort
• Just not in memory
3. Find 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 (Cont.)

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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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 Instruction Restart: Problems

▪ Consider an instruction that could access several different locations

• Block move

• Auto increment/decrement location

• Restart the whole operation?
 What if source and destination overlap?

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 Free-Frame List

▪ When a page fault occurs, the operating system must bring the
desired page from secondary storage into main memory.
▪ Most operating systems maintain a free-frame list -- a pool of free
frames for satisfying such requests.

▪ Operating system typically allocate free frames using a technique

known as zero-fill-on-demand -- the content of the frames zeroed-
out before being allocated.
▪ When a system starts up, all available memory is placed on the free-
frame list.

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 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:
a) Wait in a queue for this device until the read request is serviced
b) Wait for the device seek and/or latency time
c) Begin the transfer of the page to a free frame

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 Stages in Demand Paging (Cont.)

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
▪ 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 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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 Demand Paging Optimizations
▪ Swap space I/O faster than file system I/O even if on the same device
• Swap allocated in larger chunks, less management needed than file
system
▪ Copy entire process image to swap space at process load time
• Then page in and out of swap space
• Used in older BSD Unix
▪ Demand page in from program binary on disk, but discard rather than paging
out when freeing frame
• Used in Solaris and current BSD
• Still need to write to swap space
 Pages not associated with a file (like stack and heap) – anonymous
memory
 Pages modified in memory but not yet written back to the file system
▪ Mobile systems
• Typically don’t support swapping
• Instead, demand page from file system and reclaim read-only pages
(such as code)

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 Copy-on-Write
▪ Copy-on-Write (COW) allows both parent and child processes to initially share
the same pages in memory
• If either process modifies a shared page, only then is the page copied
▪ COW allows more efficient process creation as only modified pages are copied
▪ In general, free pages are allocated from a pool of zero-fill-on-demand pages
• Pool should always have free frames for fast demand page execution
 Don’t want to have to free a frame as well as other processing on page
fault
• Why zero-out a page before allocating it?
▪ vfork() variation on fork() system call has parent suspend and child using
copy-on-write address space of parent
• Designed to have child call exec()
• Very efficient

• Good example (Link)

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 Before Process 1 Modifies Page C

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 After Process 1 Modifies Page C

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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
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

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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!
 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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 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

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 Thrashing (Cont.)
▪ Thrashing. A process is busy swapping pages in and out

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 Prepaging
▪ To reduce the large number of page faults that occurs at process
startup
▪ Prepage all or some of the pages a process will need, before they are
referenced
▪ But if prepaged pages are unused, I/O and memory was wasted
▪ Assume s pages are prepaged and α of the pages is used
• Is cost of s * α save pages faults > or < than the cost of prepaging
s * (1- α) unnecessary pages?
• α near zero  prepaging loses

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 TLB Reach
▪ TLB Reach - The amount of memory accessible from the TLB
▪ TLB Reach = (TLB Size) X (Page Size)
▪ Ideally, the working set of each process is stored in the TLB
• Otherwise there is a high degree of page faults
▪ Increase the Page Size
• This may lead to an increase in fragmentation as not all
applications require a large page size
▪ Provide Multiple Page Sizes
• This allows applications that require larger page sizes the
opportunity to use them without an increase in fragmentation

TLB = Translation Lookaside Buffer

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 Program Structure
▪ Program structure
• int[128,128] data;
• Each row is stored in one page
• Program 1
for (j = 0; j <128; j++)
for (i = 0; i < 128; i++)
data[i,j] = 0;

128 x 128 = 16,384 page faults

• Program 2
for (i = 0; i < 128; i++)
for (j = 0; j < 128; j++)
data[i,j] = 0;

128 page faults

Operating System Concepts – 10 th Edition 10.75 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 I/O interlock
▪ I/O Interlock – Pages must
sometimes be locked into
memory
▪ Consider I/O - Pages that are
used for copying a file from a
device must be locked from
being selected for eviction by a
page replacement algorithm
▪ Pinning of pages to lock into
memory

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 End of Chapter 10

Operating System Concepts – 10 th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018