22. Summary of Memory Sub-system Organization
The chapter discusses virtual memory as a crucial component of the memory hierarchy, managing the interface between the main memory and disk. It emphasizes the mechanisms of address translation, the importance of page tables, and methods to optimize memory access while preventing thrashing. Techniques such as using large page sizes, efficient page replacement algorithms, and minimizing page faults through TLB caching are highlighted.
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What we have learnt
- Virtual memory acts as an intermediate layer between main memory and disk, allowing for address space expansion.
- Page tables and TLBs play critical roles in efficient memory access and address translation.
- Thrashing occurs when insufficient physical memory leads to excessive page swapping, and it can be mitigated by improving algorithms or increasing memory allocation.
Key Concepts
- -- Virtual Memory
- A memory management technique that provides an 'idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a computer.'
- -- Page Table
- A data structure used by the operating system to store the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses.
- -- Thrashing
- A situation where the operating system spends more time swapping pages in and out of memory than executing processes.
- -- Working Set
- The set of pages that a process is currently using and needs to access frequently to execute efficiently.
- -- TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer)
- A memory cache that stores recent translations of virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses.
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