Virtual Memory

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Outline
▪ Background
▪ Demand Paging
▪ Page Replacement
▪ Allocation of Frames
▪ Thrashing
▪ Memory-Mapped Files
▪ Allocating Kernel Memory
▪ Other Considerations

Operating System Concepts – 10th 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 page replacement algorithms: FIFO, optimal, and LRU
▪ Describe the working set of a process and explain how it is related
to program locality.

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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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Virtual Memory That is Larger Than Physical Memory

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Virtual-address Space
▪ Usually design logical address space for
the 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
▪ Invalid reference  abort
▪ Not-in-memory  bring to memory
▪ Lazy swapper – never swaps a page into
memory unless the page will be needed
• Swapper that deals with pages is a
pager

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 Basic Concepts
▪ With swapping, the pager guesses which pages will be used
before swapping them out again
▪ 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
▪ Use page table with valid-invalid bit (see chapter 9)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Page table with Valid-Invalid Bit
▪ With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v  in-memory, 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 the

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 (go to step 3)
3. Find free frame (what if there is none?)
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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Steps in Handling a Page Fault (Cont.)

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 Aspects of Demand Paging
▪ Pure demand paging: 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
▪ 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
▪ Hardware support needed for demand paging
• Page table with valid / invalid bit
• Secondary memory (swap device with swap space)
• Instruction restart

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Performance of Demand Paging
▪ Three major activities
• Service the interrupt – careful coding means just several
hundred instructions needed
• Input the page from disk – 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 )

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Before Process 1 Modifies Page C

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
• If the TLB is full of entries, then the OS must select one for replacement,
To create a space for a new page number that we believe will be
▪
required again at a later time.
▪ To achieve this, a page replacement algorithm must be executed to
decide which page to replace.
o We say a page-fault has occurred if the required page was not found in
the TLB – that is, after a TLB miss.
o Page faults can also occur when you try to access a page that is not yet in
memory.
• If a page-fault has been incurred, it’s an indication that that particular page is
really needed.
• A concept called over-allocation.
o If we keep on just increasing our degree of multiprogramming, we are
over-allocating memory.

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Page Replacement

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
▪ How to track ages of pages?
• Just use a FIFO queue

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Belady’s Anomaly
▪ Consider the string 1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5
• Adding more frames can cause more page faults!
▪ Graph illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

▪ Optimal is an example of stack algorithms that don’t suffer from

Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
▪ LRU is another example of stack algorithms; thus it does not suffer
from Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 LRU Algorithm Implementation
▪ Time-counter implementation
• Every page entry has a time-counter variable; every time a
page is referenced through this entry, copy the value of the
clock into the time-counter
• When a page needs to be changed, look at the time-counters
to find smallest value
 Search through a table is 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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 Stack Implementation
▪ Use of a stack to record most recent page references

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 LRU Approximation Algorithms
▪ Needs special hardware
▪ 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.41 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
▪ Least 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Page-Buffering Algorithms
▪ Keep a pool of free frames which is never empty
• Thus a frame is 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.47 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 FIFO Illustrating Belady’s Anomaly

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.58 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 LRU Algorithm Implementation
▪ Counter implementation
• Every page entry has a counter; every time page is referenced
through this entry, copy the value of the clock into the counter
• When a page needs to be changed, look at the counters to find
smallest value
 Search through a table is 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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 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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 Buddy System
▪ Allocates memory from fixed-size segment consisting of physically-
contiguous pages
▪ Memory allocated using power-of-2 allocator
• Satisfies requests in units sized as power of 2
• Request rounded up to next highest power of 2
• When smaller allocation needed than is available, current chunk
split into two buddies of next-lower power of 2
 Continue until appropriate sized chunk available
▪ For example, assume 256KB chunk available, kernel requests 21KB
• Split into AL and AR of 128KB each
 One further divided into BL and BR of 64KB
– One further into CL and CR of 32KB each – one used to
satisfy request
▪ Advantage – quickly coalesce unused chunks into larger chunk
▪ Disadvantage - fragmentation

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 10.61 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018