Segmentation

Segmentation is another memory management scheme that supports the user-view of

memory. Segmentation allows breaking of the virtual address space of a single process into
segments that may be placed in non-contiguous areas of physical memory.

Segmentation with Paging

Both paging and segmentation have their advantages and disadvantages, it is better to
combine these two schemes to improve on each. The combined scheme is known as 'Page
the Elements'. Each segment in this scheme is divided into pages and each segment is
maintained in a page table. So the logical address is divided into following 3 parts :

 Segment numbers(S)
 Page number (P)
 The displacement or offset number (D)

What is Virtual Memory?

Virtual Memory is a space where large programs can store themselves in form of pages
while their execution and only the required pages or portions of processes are loaded
into the main memory. This technique is useful as large virtual memory is provided for
user programs when a very small physical memory is there.
In real scenarios, most processes never need all their pages at once, for following
reasons :

 Error handling code is not needed unless that specific error occurs, some of which
are quite rare.
 Arrays are often over-sized for worst-case scenarios, and only a small fraction of the
arrays are actually used in practice.
 Certain features of certain programs are rarely used.

Benefits of having Virtual Memory

1. Large programs can be written, as virtual space available is huge compared to
physical memory.
2. Less I/O required, leads to faster and easy swapping of processes.
3. More physical memory available, as programs are stored on virtual memory, so they
occupy very less space on actual physical memory.

What is Demand Paging?

The basic idea behind demand paging is that when a process is swapped in, its pages
are not swapped in all at once. Rather they are swapped in only when the process
needs them(On demand). This is termed as lazy swapper, although a pager is a more
accurate term.
This is termed as lazy swapper, although a pager is a more accurate term.

Initially only those pages are loaded which will be required the process immediately.
The pages that are not moved into the memory, are marked as invalid in the page table. For
an invalid entry the rest of the table is empty. In case of pages that are loaded in the
memory, they are marked as valid along with the information about where to find the
swapped out page.
When the process requires any of the page that is not loaded into the memory, a page fault
trap is triggered and following steps are followed,

1. The memory address which is requested by the process is first checked, to verify the
request made by the process.
2. If its found to be invalid, the process is terminated.
3. In case the request by the process is valid, a free frame is located, possibly from a free-
frame list, where the required page will be moved.
4. A new operation is scheduled to move the necessary page from disk to the specified
memory location. ( This will usually block the process on an I/O wait, allowing some
other process to use the CPU in the meantime. )
5. When the I/O operation is complete, the process's page table is updated with the new
frame number, and the invalid bit is changed to valid.
6. The instruction that caused the page fault must now be restarted from the beginning.

There are cases when no pages are loaded into the memory initially, pages are only loaded
when demanded by the process by generating page faults. This is called Pure Demand
Paging.
The only major issue with Demand Paging is, after a new page is loaded, the process starts
execution from the beginning. Its is not a big issue for small programs, but for larger
programs it affects performance drastically.

Page Replacement
As studied in Demand Paging, only certain pages of a process are loaded initially into
the memory. This allows us to get more number of processes into the memory at the
same time. but what happens when a process requests for more pages and no free
memory is available to bring them in. Following steps can be taken to deal with this
problem :

1. Put the process in the wait queue, until any other process finishes its execution
thereby freeing frames.
2. Or, remove some other process completely from the memory to free frames.
3. Or, find some pages that are not being used right now, move them to the disk to get
free frames. This technique is called Page replacement and is most commonly
used. We have some great algorithms to carry on page replacement efficiently.
Basic Page Replacement

 Find the location of the page requested by ongoing process on the disk.
 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 any existing frame to be replaced, such frame
is known as victim frame.
 Write the victim frame to disk. Change all related page tables to indicate that this
page is no longer in memory.
 Move the required page and store it in the frame. Adjust all related page and frame
tables to indicate the change.
 Restart the process that was waiting for this page.

FIFO Page Replacement

 A very simple way of Page replacement is FIFO (First in First Out)

 As new pages are requested and are swapped in, they are added to tail of a queue
and the page which is at the head becomes the victim.
 Its not an effective way of page replacement but can be used for small systems.

LRU Page Replacement

Below is a video, which will explain LRU Page replacement algorithm in details with an
example.

Thrashing
A process that is spending more time paging than executing is said to be thrashing. In other
words it means, that the process doesn't have enough frames to hold all the pages for its
execution, so it is swapping pages in and out very frequently to keep executing. Sometimes, the
pages which will be required in the near future have to be swapped out.
Initially when the CPU utilization is low, the process scheduling mechanism, to increase the
level of multiprogramming loads multiple processes into the memory at the same time, allocating
a limited amount of frames to each process. As the memory fills up, process starts to spend a lot
of time for the required pages to be swapped in, again leading to low CPU utilization because
most of the proccesses are waiting for pages. Hence the scheduler loads more processes to
increase CPU utilization, as this continues at a point of time the complete system comes to a
stop.

To prevent thrashing we must provide processes with as many frames as they really need "right
now".
Introduction to File System
A file can be "free formed", indexed or structured collection of related bytes having meaning
only to the one who created it. Or in other words an entry in a directory is the file. The file may
have attributes like name, creator, date, type, permissions etc.

File Structure
A file has various kinds of structure. Some of them can be :

 Simple Record Structure with lines of fixed or variable lengths.

 Complex Structures like formatted document or reloadable load files.
 No Definite Structure like sequence of words and bytes etc.

Attributes of a File
Following are some of the attributes of a file :

 Name . It is the only information which is in human-readable form.

 Identifier. The file is identified by a unique tag(number) within file system.
 Type. It is needed for systems that support different types of files.
 Location. Pointer to file location on device.
 Size. The current size of the file.
 Protection. This controls and assigns the power of reading, writing, executing.
 Time, date, and user identification. This is the data for protection, security, and usage
monitoring.
File Access Methods
The way that files are accessed and read into memory is determined by Access methods. Usually
a single access method is supported by systems while there are OS's that support multiple access
methods.
1. Sequential Access

 Data is accessed one record right after another is an order.

 Read command cause a pointer to be moved ahead by one.
 Write command allocate space for the record and move the pointer to the new End Of File.
 Such a method is reasonable for tape.

2. Direct Access

 This method is useful for disks.

 The file is viewed as a numbered sequence of blocks or records.
 There are no restrictions on which blocks are read/written, it can be dobe in any order.
 User now says "read n" rather than "read next".
 "n" is a number relative to the beginning of file, not relative to an absolute physical disk
location.

3. Indexed Sequential Access

 It is built on top of Sequential access.

 It uses an Index to control the pointer while accessing files.

What is a Directory?
Information about files is maintained by Directories. A directory can contain multiple files. It can
even have directories inside of them. In Windows we also call these directories as folders.
Following is the information maintained in a directory :

 Name : The name visible to user.

 Type : Type of the directory.
 Location : Device and location on the device where the file header is located.
 Size : Number of bytes/words/blocks in the file.
 Position : Current next-read/next-write pointers.
 Protection : Access control on read/write/execute/delete.
 Usage : Time of creation, access, modification etc.
 Mounting : When the root of one file system is "grafted" into the existing tree of another
file system its called Mounting.