Chapter 10: Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts – 10th 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

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 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
• Demand segmentation

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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

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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

▪ 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

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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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 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

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 LRU Algorithm (Cont.)
▪ LRU and OPT are cases of stack algorithms that don’t have
Belady’s Anomaly
▪ Use Of A Stack to Record Most Recent Page References

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 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

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 LRU Approximation Algorithms (cont.)

▪ 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

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 Counting Algorithms

▪ Keep a counter of the number of references that have been made

to each page
• Not common
▪ Lease Frequently Used (LFU) Algorithm:
• Replaces page with smallest count
▪ Most Frequently Used (MFU) Algorithm:
• Based on the argument that the page with the smallest count
was probably just brought in and has yet to be used

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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 Reclaiming Pages
▪ A strategy to implement global page-replacement policy
▪ All memory requests are satisfied from the free-frame list, rather than
waiting for the list to drop to zero before we begin selecting pages for
replacement,
▪ Page replacement is triggered when the list falls below a certain
threshold.
▪ This strategy attempts to ensure there is always sufficient free
memory to satisfy new requests.

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 Reclaiming Pages Example

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 Non-Uniform Memory Access
▪ So far, we assumed that all memory accessed equally
▪ Many systems are NUMA – speed of access to memory varies
• Consider system boards containing CPUs and memory,
interconnected over a system bus
▪ NUMA multiprocessing architecture

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 Non-Uniform Memory Access (Cont.)

▪ Optimal performance comes from allocating memory “close to” the

CPU on which the thread is scheduled
• And modifying the scheduler to schedule the thread on the same
system board when possible
• Solved by Solaris by creating lgroups
 Structure to track CPU / Memory low latency groups
 Used my schedule and pager
 When possible schedule all threads of a process and allocate
all memory for that process within the lgroup

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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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 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?
 size of locality > total memory size

▪ Limit effects by using local or priority page replacement

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 Locality In A Memory-Reference Pattern

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 Working-Set Model
▪   working-set window  a fixed number of page references
Example: 10,000 instructions
▪ WSSi (working set of Process Pi) = total number of pages referenced
in the most recent  (varies in time)
• if  too small will not encompass entire locality
• if  too large will encompass several localities
• if  =   will encompass entire program
▪ D =  WSSi  total demand frames
• Approximation of locality

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 Working-Set Model (Cont.)
▪ if D > m  Thrashing
▪ Policy if D > m, then suspend or swap out one of the
processes

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 Keeping Track of the Working Set
▪ Approximate with interval timer + a reference bit
▪ Example:  = 10,000
• Timer interrupts after every 5000 time units
• Keep in memory 2 bits for each page
• Whenever a timer interrupts copy and sets the values of all
reference bits to 0
• If one of the bits in memory = 1  page in working set
▪ Why is this not completely accurate?
▪ Improvement = 10 bits and interrupt every 1000 time units

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 Page-Fault Frequency
▪ More direct approach than WSS
▪ Establish “acceptable” page-fault frequency (PFF) rate and use
local replacement policy
• If actual rate too low, process loses frame
• If actual rate too high, process gains frame

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 Working Sets and Page Fault Rates
▪ Direct relationship between working set of a process and its
page-fault rate
▪ Working set changes over time
▪ Peaks and valleys over time

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 Allocating Kernel Memory
▪ Treated differently from user memory
▪ Often allocated from a free-memory pool
• Kernel requests memory for structures of varying sizes
• Some kernel memory needs to be contiguous
 i.e., for device I/O

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 Other Considerations
▪ Prepaging
▪ Page size
▪ Program structure
▪ I/O interlock and page locking

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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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 Page Size
▪ Sometimes OS designers have a choice
• Especially if running on custom-built CPU
▪ Page size selection must take into consideration:
• Fragmentation
• Page table size
• Resolution
• I/O overhead
• Number of page faults
• Locality
• TLB size and effectiveness
▪ Always power of 2, usually in the range 212 (4,096 bytes) to 222
(4,194,304 bytes)
▪ On average, growing over time

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 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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 Operating System Examples

▪ Windows

▪ Solaris

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 Windows
▪ Uses demand paging with clustering. Clustering brings in pages
surrounding the faulting page
▪ Processes are assigned working set minimum and working set
maximum
▪ Working set minimum is the minimum number of pages the
process is guaranteed to have in memory
▪ A process may be assigned as many pages up to its working set
maximum
▪ When the amount of free memory in the system falls below a
threshold, automatic working set trimming is performed to
restore the amount of free memory
▪ Working set trimming removes pages from processes that have
pages in excess of their working set minimum

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 Solaris
▪ Maintains a list of free pages to assign faulting processes
▪ Lotsfree – threshold parameter (amount of free memory) to begin
paging
▪ Desfree – threshold parameter to increasing paging
▪ Minfree – threshold parameter to being swapping
▪ Paging is performed by pageout process
▪ Pageout scans pages using modified clock algorithm
▪ Scanrate is the rate at which pages are scanned. This ranges from
slowscan to fastscan
▪ Pageout is called more frequently depending upon the amount of free
memory available
▪ Priority paging gives priority to process code pages

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 End of Chapter 10

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Performance of Demand Paging
▪ 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:
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

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 Need For Page Replacement

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 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

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 Memory Compression
▪ Memory compression -- rather than paging out modified frames to swap
space, we compress several frames into a single frame, enabling the system
to reduce memory usage without resorting to swapping pages.
▪ Consider the following free-frame-list consisting of 6 frames

▪ Assume that this number of free frames falls below a certain threshold that
triggers page replacement. The replacement algorithm (say, an LRU
approximation algorithm) selects four frames -- 15, 3, 35, and 26 to place on
the free-frame list. It first places these frames on a modified-frame list.
Typically, the modified-frame list would next be written to swap space, making
the frames available to the free-frame list. An alternative strategy is to
compress a number of frames{\mdash}say, three{\mdash}and store their
compressed versions n a single page frame.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.72 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Memory Compression (Cont.)
▪ An alternative to paging is memory compression.
▪ Rather than paging out modified frames to swap space, we compress
several frames into a single frame, enabling the system to reduce
memory usage without resorting to swapping pages.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.73 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018