394Chapter 8 Main Memory
c.Are there any disadvantages to this address-translation system? If so, what are they? If not, why is this scheme not used by every manufacturer?
Programming Problems
8.33Assume that a system has a 32-bit virtual address with a 4-KB page size. Write a C program that is passed a virtual address (in decimal) on the command line and have it output the page number and offset for the given address. As an example, your program would run as follows:
./a.out 19986
Your program would output:
The address 19986 contains: page number = 4
offset = 3602
Writing this program will require using the appropriate data type to store 32 bits. We encourage you to use unsigned data types as well.
Bibliographical Notes
Dynamic storage allocation was discussed by [Knuth (1973)] (Section 2.5), who found through simulation that first fit is generally superior to best fit. [Knuth (1973)] also discussed the 50-percent rule.
The concept of paging can be credited to the designers of the Atlas system, which has been described by [Kilburn et al. (1961)] and by [Howarth et al. (1961)]. The concept of segmentation was first discussed by [Dennis (1965)]. Paged segmentation was first supported in the GE 645, on which MULTICS was originally implemented ([Organick (1972)] and [Daley and Dennis (1967)]).
Inverted page tables are discussed in an article about the IBM RT storage manager by [Chang and Mergen (1988)].
[Hennessy and Patterson (2012)] explains the hardware aspects of TLBs, caches, and MMUs. [Talluri et al. (1995)] discusses page tables for 64-bit address spaces. [Jacob and Mudge (2001)] describes techniques for managing the TLB. [Fang et al. (2001)] evaluates support for large pages.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg487512. aspx discusses PAE support for Windows systems.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-sof- tware-developer-manuals.html provides various manuals for Intel 64 and IA-32 architectures.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a9.php provides an overview of the ARM architecture.
Bibliography
[Chang and Mergen (1988)] A. Chang and M. F. Mergen, “801 Storage: Architecture and Programming”, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Volume 6, Number 1 (1988), pages 28–50.
Bibliography 395
[Daley and Dennis (1967)] R. C. Daley and J. B. Dennis, “Virtual Memory, Processes, and Sharing in Multics”, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (1967), pages 121–128.
[Dennis (1965)] J. B. Dennis, “Segmentation and the Design of Multiprogrammed Computer Systems”, Communications of the ACM, Volume 8, Number 4 (1965), pages 589–602.
[Fang et al. (2001)] Z. Fang, L. Zhang, J. B. Carter, W. C. Hsieh, and S. A. McKee, “Reevaluating Online Superpage Promotion with Hardware Support”, Proceedings of the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, Volume 50, Number 5 (2001).
[Hennessy and Patterson (2012)] J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Fifth Edition, Morgan Kaufmann (2012).
[Howarth et al. (1961)] D. J. Howarth, R. B. Payne, and F. H. Sumner, “The Manchester University Atlas Operating System, Part II: User’s Description”, Computer Journal, Volume 4, Number 3 (1961), pages 226–229.
[Jacob and Mudge (2001)] B. Jacob and T. Mudge, “Uniprocessor Virtual Memory Without TLBs”, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Volume 50, Number 5 (2001).
[Kilburn et al. (1961)] T. Kilburn, D. J. Howarth, R. B. Payne, and F. H. Sumner, “The Manchester University Atlas Operating System, Part I: Internal Organization”, Computer Journal, Volume 4, Number 3 (1961), pages 222–225.
[Knuth (1973)] D. E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley (1973).
[Organick (1972)] E. I. Organick, The Multics System: An Examination of Its Structure, MIT Press (1972).
[Talluri et al. (1995)] M. Talluri, M. D. Hill, and Y. A. Khalidi, “A New Page Table for 64-bit Address Spaces”, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (1995), pages 184–200.
C H9A P T E R
Virtual
Memory
In Chapter 8, we discussed various memory-management strategies used in computer systems. All these strategies have the same goal: to keep many processes in memory simultaneously to allow multiprogramming. However, they tend to require that an entire process be in memory before it can execute.
Virtual memory is a technique that allows the execution of processes that are not completely in memory. One major advantage of this scheme is that programs can be larger than physical memory. Further, virtual memory abstracts main memory into an extremely large, uniform array of storage, separating logical memory as viewed by the user from physical memory. This technique frees programmers from the concerns of memory-storage limitations. Virtual memory also allows processes to share files easily and to implement shared memory. In addition, it provides an efficient mechanism for process creation. Virtual memory is not easy to implement, however, and may substantially decrease performance if it is used carelessly. In this chapter, we discuss virtual memory in the form of demand paging and examine its complexity and cost.
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
•To describe the benefits of a virtual memory system.
•To explain the concepts of demand paging, page-replacement algorithms, and allocation of page frames.
•To discuss the principles of the working-set model.
•To examine the relationship between shared memory and memory-mapped files.
•To explore how kernel memory is managed.
9.1Background
The memory-management algorithms outlined in Chapter 8 are necessary because of one basic requirement: The instructions being executed must be
398Chapter 9 Virtual Memory
in physical memory. The first approach to meeting this requirement is to place the entire logical address space in physical memory. Dynamic loading can help to ease this restriction, but it generally requires special precautions and extra work by the programmer.
The requirement that instructions must be in physical memory to be executed seems both necessary and reasonable; but it is also unfortunate, since it limits the size of a program to the size of physical memory. In fact, an examination of real programs shows us that, in many cases, the entire program is not needed. For instance, consider the following:
•Programs often have code to handle unusual error conditions. Since these errors seldom, if ever, occur in practice, this code is almost never executed.
•Arrays, lists, and tables are often allocated more memory than they actually need. An array may be declared 100 by 100 elements, even though it is seldom larger than 10 by 10 elements. An assembler symbol table may have room for 3,000 symbols, although the average program has less than 200 symbols.
•Certain options and features of a program may be used rarely. For instance, the routines on U.S. government computers that balance the budget have not been used in many years.
Even in those cases where the entire program is needed, it may not all be needed at the same time.
The ability to execute a program that is only partially in memory would confer many benefits:
•A program would no longer be constrained by the amount of physical memory that is available. Users would be able to write programs for an extremely large virtual address space, simplifying the programming task.
•Because each user program could take less physical memory, more programs could be run at the same time, with a corresponding increase in
CPU utilization and throughput but with no increase in response time or turnaround time.
•Less I/O would be needed to load or swap user programs into memory, so each user program would run faster.
Thus, running a program that is not entirely in memory would benefit both the system and the user.
Virtual memory involves the separation of logical memory as perceived by users from physical memory. This separation allows an extremely large virtual memory to be provided for programmers when only a smaller physical memory is available (Figure 9.1). Virtual memory makes the task of programming much easier, because the programmer no longer needs to worry about the amount of physical memory available; she can concentrate instead on the problem to be programmed.
The virtual address space of a process refers to the logical (or virtual) view of how a process is stored in memory. Typically, this view is that a process begins at a certain logical address —say, address 0—and exists in contiguous memory, as shown in Figure 9.2. Recall from Chapter 8, though, that in fact
9.1 Background 399
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Figure 9.1 Diagram showing virtual memory that is larger than physical memory.
physical memory may be organized in page frames and that the physical page frames assigned to a process may not be contiguous. It is up to the memorymanagement unit (MMU) to map logical pages to physical page frames in memory.
Note in Figure 9.2 that we allow the heap to grow upward in memory as it is used for dynamic memory allocation. Similarly, we allow for the stack to
Max
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Figure 9.2 Virtual address space.
400 |
Chapter 9 Virtual Memory |
shared library |
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Figure 9.3 Shared library using virtual memory.
grow downward in memory through successive function calls. The large blank space (or hole) between the heap and the stack is part of the virtual address space but will require actual physical pages only if the heap or stack grows. Virtual address spaces that include holes are known as sparse address spaces. Using a sparse address space is beneficial because the holes can be filled as the stack or heap segments grow or if we wish to dynamically link libraries (or possibly other shared objects) during program execution.
In addition to separating logical memory from physical memory, virtual memory allows files and memory to be shared by two or more processes through page sharing (Section 8.5.4). This leads to the following benefits:
•System libraries can be shared by several processes through mapping of the shared object into a virtual address space. Although each process considers the libraries to be part of its virtual address space, the actual pages where the libraries reside in physical memory are shared by all the processes (Figure 9.3). Typically, a library is mapped read-only into the space of each process that is linked with it.
•Similarly, processes can share memory. Recall from Chapter 3 that two or more processes can communicate through the use of shared memory. Virtual memory allows one process to create a region of memory that it can share with another process. Processes sharing this region consider it part of their virtual address space, yet the actual physical pages of memory are shared, much as is illustrated in Figure 9.3.
•Pages can be shared during process creation with the fork() system call, thus speeding up process creation.
We further explore these —and other —benefits of virtual memory later in this chapter. First, though, we discuss implementing virtual memory through demand paging.
