Lesson 9

Introduction to Paging
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 Basic idea: allocate physical memory to processes in fixed size

chunks called page frames. Present abstraction to application of a
single linear address space. Inside machine, break address space
of application up into fixed size chunks called pages. Pages and
page frames are same size. Store pages in page frames. When
process generates an address, dynamically translate to the
physical page frame which holds data for that page.
 So, a virtual address now consists of two pieces: a page number
and an offset within that page. Page sizes are typically powers of 2;
this simplifies extraction of page numbers and offsets. To access a
piece of data at a given address, system automatically does the
following:
o Extracts page number.
o Extracts offset.
o Translate page number to physical page frame id.
o Accesses data at offset in physical page frame.
 How does system perform translation? Simplest solution: use a
page table. Page table is a linear array indexed by virtual page
number that gives the physical page frame that contains that page.
What is lookup process?
o Extract page number.
o Extract offset.
o Check that page number is within address space of
process.
o Look up page number in page table.
o Add offset to resulting physical page number
o Access memory location.

Problem: for each memory access that processor generates, must

now generate two physical memory accesses.

 Speed up the lookup problem with a cache. Store most recent page
lookup values in TLB. TLB design options: fully associative, direct
mapped, set associative, etc. Can make direct mapped larger for a
given amount of circuit space.
 How does lookup work now?
o Extract page number.
o Extract offset.
o Look up page number in TLB.
o If there, add offset to physical page number and access
memory location.
o Otherwise, trap to OS. OS performs check, looks up
physical page number, and loads translation into TLB.
Restarts the instruction.
 Like any cache, TLB can work well, or it can work poorly. What is a
good and bad case for a direct mapped TLB? What about fully
associative TLBs, or set associative TLB?
 Fixed size allocation of physical memory in page frames
 dramatically simplifies allocation algorithm. OS can just keep track
of free and used pages and allocate free pages when a process
needs memory. There is no fragmentation of physical memory into
smaller and smaller allocatable chunks.
 But, are still pieces of memory that are unused. What happens if a
program's address space does not end on a page boundary? Rest
of page goes unused. Book calls this internal fragmentation.
 How do processes share memory? The OS makes their page tables
point to the same physical page frames. Useful for fast interprocess
communication mechanisms. This is very nice because it allows
transparent sharing at speed.
 What about protection? There are a variety of protections:
o Preventing one process from reading or writing another
process' memory.
o Preventing one process from reading another process'
memory.
o Preventing a process from reading or writing some of its
own memory.
o Preventing a process from reading some of its own
memory.

How is this protection integrated into the above scheme?

 Preventing a process from reading or writing memory: OS refuses

to establish a mapping from virtual address space to physical page
frame containing the protected memory. When program attempts
to access this memory, OS will typically generate a fault. If user
process catches the fault, can take action to fix things up.
 Preventing a process from writing memory, but allowing a process
to read memory. OS sets a write protect bit in the TLB entry. If
process attempts to write the memory, OS generates a fault. But,
reads go through just fine.
 Virtual Memory Introduction.
 When a segmented system needed more memory, it swapped
segments out to disk and then swapped them back in again when
necessary. Page based systems can do something similar on a
page basis.
 Basic idea: when OS needs to a physical page frame to store a
page, and there are none free, it can select one page and store it
out to disk. It can then use the newly free page frame for the new
page. Some pragmatic considerations:
o In practice, it makes sense to keep a few free page frames.
When number of free pages drops below this threshold,
choose a page and store it out. This way, can overlap I/O
required to store out a page with computation that uses
the newly allocated page frame.
o In practice the page frame size usually equals the disk
block size. Why?
o Do you need to allocate disk space for a virtual page before
you swap it out? (Not if always keep one page frame free)
Why did BSD do this? At some point OS must refuse to
allocate a process more memory because has no swap
space. When can this happen? (malloc, stack extension,
new process creation).
 When process tries to access paged out memory, OS must run off
to the disk, find a free page frame, then read page back off of disk
into the page frame and restart process.
 What is advantage of virtual memory/paging?
o Can run programs whose virtual address space is larger
than physical memory. In effect, one process shares
 physical memory with itself.
o Can also flexibly share machine between processes whose
total address space sizes exceed the physical memory size.
o Supports a wide range of user-level stuff - See Li and Appel
paper.
 Disadvantages of VM/paging: extra resource consumption.
o Memory overhead for storing page tables. In extreme
cases, page table may take up a significant portion of
virtual memory. One Solution: page the page table. Others:
go to a more complicated data structure for storing virtual
to physical translations.
o Translation overhead.