Memory Management

Memory management is the act of managing computer memory. In its simpler forms, this involves providing ways to allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and freeing it for reuse when no longer needed. The management of main memory is critical to the computer system.

·         Virtual memory systems separate the memory addresses used by a process from actual physical addresses, allowing separation of processes and increasing the effectively available amount of RAM using disk swapping. The quality of the virtual memory manager can have a big impact on overall system performance.

·         Garbage collection is the automated allocation, and deallocation of computer memory resources for a program. This is generally implemented at the programming language level and is in opposition to manual memory management, the explicit allocation and deallocation of computer memory resources.

·         Paging-In computer operating systems there are various ways in which the operating system can store and retrieve data from secondary storage for use in main memory. One such memory management scheme is referred to as paging. In the paging memory-management scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages. The main advantage of paging is that it allows the physical address space of a process to be noncontiguous. Prior to paging, systems had to fit whole programs into storage contiguously which caused various storage and fragmentation problems.

Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementation in most contemporary general-purpose operating systems, allowing them to use disk storage for data that does not fit into physical Random-access memory (RAM).

Features

Memory management systems on multi-tasking operating systems usually deal with the following issues.

·         Relocation

·         Protection

·         Sharing

·         Logical organization

·         Physical organization

PIYUSH THAKUR (CR)

POOJA SUTAR (ACR)