NUST School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Virtual Memory Management

Muhammad Rizwan Javed(283)

Muhammad Faizan Khan(278)

Bachelors of Information & Communication System Engineering

NUST-SEECS

as many addresses as main memory. A

program can not be fit into a main memory
Abstract: at once that is using all of virtual memory.
Recent technological advances in Such program can be executed by copying
memory management architectures, those portions of the program needed at any
multiprocessor systems, and software given point during execution into main
memory.
architectures dictate a reevaluation of
the virtual memory management
support provided by an operating
system. This paper describes the
implementation of virtual memory in
different operating systems, i.e. Linux,
Mach, Windows and android. Similarly
these operating systems are directly
interacted with multiprocessor systems,
embedded systems.
The operating system breaks virtual memory
into pages in order to facilitate the virtual
memory to be copied into real memory.
1. Introduction
These pages contain a fixed number of
addresses. Before execution each page is
As we know that an integral part of stored on the hard disk. When there is a
computer architecture is Virtual memory. requirement of new page, the operating
The sole purpose of virtual memory is to system copies it from disk to main memory,
increase the address space so that a program then translates its virtual addresses into real
can utilize more set of addressees. For addresses.
example, virtual memory can contain twice

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Mapping is the process of translating virtual
addresses into real addresses. Swapping is
actually the copying of virtual pages stored
on hard disk to main memory.
2. Discussion and Analysis:
When the process is loaded the
system will copy the application data and its
respective instruction into main memory
from hard disk. In this way, the system can
easily take advantage of its resources such
as CPU to process and execute it. The
system starts moving data & instruction that
need not to be processed further into VM
once the system memory gets filled up. It
will be doing this until those data and
instruction are needed to process again. So
the system can check & call the new
instruction &application data and then copy
it into the main memory, so that system can
process the rest information and load the
program. When there is need of processing
data and instruction again that is in VM, the
system will first check for its space in the
main memory. The data and instruction will
get swapped into the main memory if is
there is enough room for it. At the other end
if there is no space left for the main
memory, the system will check the main
memory first and then move any data and
instructions those are not needed into the
Virtual Memory. It then swaps the
respective data and instruction into main
memory from VM those which need to be
processed.
Virtual Memory in Multiprocessors
A very good representation of
multiprocessors having characteristics of
message passing and particular
configuration of a distributed-memory is
hypercube. Here comes the concept of nodes
which are actually processor/memory pairs
and are connected to each other so that these
can establish binary N-cube. Normally most
of hypercube programs are structured in
specific way that all nodes possess the same
copy of program, as well as that of node
operating system. This leads to huge
wastage of memory, which results limitation
in size and complexity of hypercube
application programs. One simple solution
to this problem is by implementation of VM
on the hypercube, in which each node
performs the operation of demand paging for
usage of page that is not resident to that
node.Similarly,it copies operating system
program and the node that is distributed
among all the nodes of the hypercube.
Parallel processing is of common use today.
It can be handled at two levels. First,
protection primitives and flexible sharing
provide enough support for high-
performance parallel applications. Second, is
that of VM. This technique is fully parallel,
which allows efficient execution on parallel
processors.
Virtual Memory in Embedded system
Virtual memory is not used in other
special-purpose and embedded systems
computer systems that require very fast and
very consistent response times due to
decreased determinism. Virtual memory
systems produce unpredictable interrupts
that can produce unwanted "jitter" during
I/O operations. That is why embedded
hardware costs are kept low by
implementing all such operations with
software instead of using dedicated
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hardware. There is a little use for
multitasking features or complicated
memory hierarchies in embedded systems.
Virtual Memory in Mach OS
Mach offers advanced use of virtual
memory by providing powerful internal
primitives that allow for virtually arbitrary
mapping relations to be created. Shared
memory and support for file mapping have
all been provided.
Virtual Memory in Android OS
In order to give more demanding
applications and more heap space to android
Operating systems, VM Heap Tool is used.
VM Heap Tool allows changing the virtual
memory heap size, decreasing the frequency
of garbage collection and giving apps more
heap space. The app facilitates to easily
change the VM heap size without using any
adb commands.
VM Heap Tool can modify a variable that
can affect the stability of the system.
Virtual Memory in Linux
VM is also of much importance in
Linux. It supports virtual memory, that is,
usage of disk as RAM extension for
effective processing. Here Kernel plays
important role as it will write the contents of
a block of memory which is currently
unused to the hard disk so that the memory
can be used for another purpose. MMU is
involved in every VMM except disk
subsystem. Virtual addresses can be
accessed by the MMU which allows the
operating system by using data structures to
track these translations. Its main job is to
translate these virtual addresses into
physical addresses, so that the right section
of RAM is accessed.
The interaction with MMU is done with the
help of Zoned Buddy Allocator, which
provides valid pages when the kernel asks
for them. It keeps track of different
categories of memory addresses and
manages lists of pages.
The Slab Allocator is another layer in front
of the Buddy Allocator, and provides the
ability to create cache of memory objects in
memory.
3. Conclusion:
It is concluded that virtual memory is
of much importance in operating systems to
increase the performance of computers.
Virtual memory is nothing but a file in hard
disk. When there is an excessive usage of
RAM, Programs which having least priority
will reside on hard disk and it execute from
hard disk only but not in RAM.
4. References:
1. Machine-Independent Virtual Memory
Management for Paged Uniprocessor and
Multiprocessor - Architectures
RICHARD RASHID, AVADIS TEVANIAN, JR.,
MICHAEL YOUNG, DAVID GOLUB, ROBERT
BARON, DAVID BLACK, WILLIAM J. BOLOSKY,
AND JONATHAN CHEW
2. Virtual Memory for a Hypercube
Multiprocessor
Joan M. Francioni ,David A. Poplawski,
Seema Pahwa
Department of Computer Science Michigan
Technological University ,Houghton
3. http://www.androidng.com