Advanced Operating

System
Professor Mangal Sain
 Lecture 6

Virtual Memory
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 principle of the working-set
model
 To examine the relationship between shared
memory and memory-mapped files
 To explore how kernel memory is managed
Lecture 6 – Part 1

Demand Paging
BACKGROUND
 Code needs to be in memory to execute, but entire
program rarely used
 Error code, unusual routines, large data structures
 Entire program code not needed at same time
 Consider ability to execute partially-loaded program
 Program no longer constrained by limits of physical memory
 Each program takes less memory while running -> more
programs run at the same time
 Increased CPU utilization and throughput with no increase in
response time or turnaround time
 Less I/O needed to load or swap programs into memory -> each
user program runs faster
 BACKGROUND (CONT.)

 Virtual memory – separation of user logical memory

from physical memory
 Only part of the program needs to be in memory for
execution
 Logical address space can therefore be much larger than
physical address space
 Allows address spaces to be shared by several processes
 Allows for more efficient process creation
 More programs running concurrently
 Less I/O needed to load or swap processes
BACKGROUND (CONT.)
 Virtual address space – logical view of
how process is stored in memory
 Usually start at address 0, contiguous addresses
until end of space
 Meanwhile, physical memory organized in page
frames
 MMU must map logical to physical
 Virtual memory can be implemented via:
 Demand paging
 Demand segmentation
VIRTUAL MEMORY THAT IS LARGER THAN PHYSICAL MEMORY
VIRTUAL-ADDRESS SPACE
Usually design logical address space for stack to
start at Max logical address and grow “down” while
heap grows “up”
Maximizes address space use
Unused address space between the two is
hole
 No physical memory needed until heap or
stack grows to a given new page
Enables sparse address spaces with holes left for
growth, dynamically linked libraries, etc
System libraries shared via mapping into virtual
address space
Shared memory by mapping pages read-write into
virtual address space
Pages can be shared during fork(), speeding
process creation
SHARED LIBRARY USING VIRTUAL MEMORY
DEMAND PAGING
 Could bring entire process into memory at load
time
 Or bring a page into memory only when it is
needed
 Less I/O needed, no unnecessary I/O
 Less memory needed
 Faster response
 More users
 Similar to paging system with swapping
(diagram on right)
 Page is needed  reference to it
 invalid reference  abort
 not-in-memory  bring to memory
 Lazy swapper – never swaps a page into
memory unless page will be needed
 Swapper that deals with pages is a pager
BASIC CONCEPTS
 With swapping, pager guesses which pages will
be used before swapping out again
 Instead, pager brings in only those pages into
memory
 How to determine that set of pages?
 Need new MMU functionality to implement demand
paging
 If pages needed are already memory resident
 No difference from non demand-paging
 If page needed and not memory resident
 Need to detect and load the page into memory from
storage
 Without changing program behavior
 Without programmer needing to change code
VALID-INVALID BIT
 With each page table entry a valid–invalid bit is associated
(v  in-memory – memory resident, i  not-in-memory)
 Initially valid–invalid bit is set to i on all entries
 Example of a page table snapshot:

 During MMU address translation, if valid–invalid bit in page

table entry is i  page fault
PAGE TABLE WHEN SOME PAGES ARE NOT IN MAIN MEMORY
PAGE FAULT

 If there is a reference to a page, first reference to

that page will trap to operating system:
page fault
1. Operating system looks at another table to decide:
 Invalid reference  abort
 Just not in memory
2. Find free frame
3. Swap page into frame via scheduled disk operation
4. Reset tables to indicate page now in memory
Set validation bit = v
5. Restart the instruction that caused the page fault
STEPS IN HANDLING A PAGE FAULT
ASPECTS OF DEMAND PAGING
 Extreme case – start process with no pages in memory
 OS sets instruction pointer to first instruction of process, non-
memory-resident -> page fault
 And for every other process pages on first access
 Pure demand paging
 Actually, a given instruction could access multiple
pages -> multiple page faults
 Consider fetch and decode of instruction which adds 2
numbers from memory and stores result back to memory
 Pain decreased because of locality of reference
 Hardware support needed for demand paging
 Page table with valid / invalid bit
 Secondary memory (swap device with swap space)
 Instruction restart
INSTRUCTION RESTART

 Consider an instruction that could access several

different locations
 block move

 auto increment/decrement location

 Restart the whole operation?
 What if source and destination overlap?
 PERFORMANCE OF DEMAND PAGING
 Stages in Demand Paging (worse case)
1. Trap to the operating system

2. Save the user registers and process state

3. Determine that the interrupt was a page fault

4. Check that the page reference was legal and determine the location of the page
on the disk
5. Issue a read from the disk to a free frame:
1. Wait in a queue for this device until the read request is serviced
2. Wait for the device seek and/or latency time
3. Begin the transfer of the page to a free frame
6. While waiting, allocate the CPU to some other user

7. Receive an interrupt from the disk I/O subsystem (I/O completed)

8. Save the registers and process state for the other user

9. Determine that the interrupt was from the disk

10. Correct the page table and other tables to show page is now in memory

11. Wait for the CPU to be allocated to this process again

12. Restore the user registers, process state, and new page table, and then resume
the interrupted instruction
PERFORMANCE OF DEMAND PAGING (CONT.)
 Three major activities
 Service the interrupt – careful coding means just several hundred
instructions needed
 Read the page – lots of time
 Restart the process – again just a small amount of time
 Page Fault Rate 0  p  1
 if p = 0 no page faults
 if p = 1, every reference is a fault
 Effective Access Time (EAT)
EAT = (1 – p) x memory access
+ p (page fault overhead
+ swap page out
+ swap page in )
DEMAND PAGING OPTIMIZATIONS
 Swap space I/O faster than file system I/O even if on the same device
 Swap allocated in larger chunks, less management needed than file
system
 Copy entire process image to swap space at process load time
 Then page in and out of swap space
 Used in older BSD Unix
 Demand page in from program binary on disk, but discard rather than
paging out when freeing frame
 Used in Solaris and current BSD
 Still need to write to swap space
 Pages not associated with a file (like stack and heap) – anonymous
memory
 Pages modified in memory but not yet written back to the file
system
 Mobile systems
 Typically don’t support swapping
 Instead, demand page from file system and reclaim read-only pages
(such as code)
 Lecture 6 – Part 2

Virtual Memory contd.

COPY-ON-WRITE
 Copy-on-Write (COW) allows both parent and child processes to
initially share the same pages in memory
 If either process modifies a shared page, only then is the page
copied
 COW allows more efficient process creation as only modified pages
are copied
 In general, free pages are allocated from a pool of zero-fill-on-
demand pages
 Pool should always have free frames for fast demand page
execution
 Don’t want to have to free a frame as well as other processing

on page fault
 vfork() variation on fork() system call has parent suspend and
child using copy-on-write address space of parent
 Designed to have child call exec()
 Very efficient
BEFORE PROCESS 1 MODIFIES PAGE C
AFTER PROCESS 1 MODIFIES PAGE C
PAGE REPLACEMENT

 Prevent over-allocation of memory by

modifying page-fault service routine to
include page replacement
 Use modify (dirty) bit to reduce
overhead of page transfers – only modified
pages are written to disk
 Page replacement completes separation
between logical memory and physical
memory – large virtual memory can be
provided on a smaller physical memory
NEED FOR PAGE REPLACEMENT
BASIC PAGE REPLACEMENT
1. Find the location of the desired page on disk

2. Find a free frame:

- If there is a free frame, use it
- If there is no free frame, use a page replacement
algorithm to select a victim frame
- Write victim frame to disk if dirty

3. Bring the desired page into the (newly) free frame; update
the page and frame tables

4. Continue the process by restarting the instruction that

caused the trap

Note now potentially 2 page transfers for page fault –

increasing EAT
PAGE REPLACEMENT
PAGE AND FRAME REPLACEMENT ALGORITHMS
 Frame-allocation algorithm determines
 How many frames to give each process
 Which frames to replace
 Page-replacement algorithm
 Want lowest page-fault rate on both first access and re-access
 Evaluate algorithm by running it on a particular string
of memory references (reference string) and computing
the number of page faults on that string
 String is just page numbers, not full addresses
 Repeated access to the same page does not cause a page fault
 Results depend on number of frames available
GRAPH OF PAGE FAULTS VERSUS THE NUMBER OF FRAMES
FIRST-IN-FIRST-OUT (FIFO) ALGORITHM
 Reference string: 7,0,1,2,0,3,0,4,2,3,0,3,0,3,2,1,2,0,1,7,0,1
 3 frames (3 pages can be in memory at a time per process)

15 page faults

 Can vary by reference string: consider

1,2,3,4,1,2,5,1,2,3,4,5
 Adding more frames can cause more page faults!
 Belady’s Anomaly
 How to track ages of pages?
 Just use a FIFO queue
FIFO ILLUSTRATING BELADY’S ANOMALY
OPTIMAL ALGORITHM
 Replace page that will not be used for longest period of time
 9 is optimal for the example
 How do you know this?
 Can’t read the future
 Used for measuring how well your algorithm performs
LEAST RECENTLY USED (LRU) ALGORITHM
 Use past knowledge rather than future
 Replace page that has not been used in the most amount
of time
 Associate time of last use with each page

 12 faults – better than FIFO but worse than OPT

 Generally good algorithm and frequently used
 But how to implement?
LRU ALGORITHM (CONT.)
 Counter implementation
 Every page entry has a counter; every time page is referenced
through this entry, copy the clock into the counter
 When a page needs to be changed, look at the counters to find
smallest value
 Search through table needed
 Stack implementation
 Keep a stack of page numbers in a double link form:
 Page referenced:
 move it to the top
 requires 6 pointers to be changed

 But each update more expensive

 No search for replacement
 LRU and OPT are cases of stack algorithms that don’t
have Belady’s Anomaly
USE OF A STACK TO RECORD MOST RECENT PAGE REFERENCES
 Lecture 6 – Part 3

Virtual Memory contd.

LRU APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS
 LRU needs special hardware and still slow
 Reference bit
 With each page associate a bit, initially = 0
 When page is referenced bit set to 1
 Replace any with reference bit = 0 (if one exists)
 We do not know the order, however
 Second-chance algorithm
 Generally FIFO, plus hardware-provided reference bit
 Clock replacement
 If page to be replaced has
 Reference bit = 0 -> replace it
 reference bit = 1 then:

 set reference bit 0, leave page in memory

 replace next page, subject to same rules

SECOND-CHANCE (CLOCK) PAGE-REPLACEMENT ALGORITHM
ENHANCED SECOND-CHANCE ALGORITHM
 Improve algorithm by using reference bit and modify bit (if
available) in concert
 Take ordered pair (reference, modify)
1. (0, 0) neither recently used not modified – best page to replace
2. (0, 1) not recently used but modified – not quite as good, must
write out before replacement
3. (1, 0) recently used but clean – probably will be used again
soon
4. (1, 1) recently used and modified – probably will be used again
soon and need to write out before replacement
 When page replacement called for, use the clock scheme but
use the four classes replace page in lowest non-empty class
 Might need to search circular queue several times
COUNTING ALGORITHMS
 Keep a counter of the number of references that
have been made to each page
 Not common

 Lease Frequently Used (LFU) Algorithm:

replaces page with smallest count

 Most Frequently Used (MFU) Algorithm: based

on the argument that the page with the smallest
count was probably just brought in and has yet to be
used
PAGE-BUFFERING ALGORITHMS
 Keep a pool of free frames, always
 Then frame available when needed, not found at fault time
 Read page into free frame and select victim to evict and add to
free pool
 When convenient, evict victim

 Possibly, keep list of modified pages

 When backing store otherwise idle, write pages there and set to
non-dirty
 Possibly, keep free frame contents intact and note what is
in them
 If referenced again before reused, no need to load contents
again from disk
 Generally useful to reduce penalty if wrong victim frame
selected
APPLICATIONS AND PAGE REPLACEMENT
 All of these algorithms have OS guessing about future
page access
 Some applications have better knowledge – i.e. databases

 Memory intensive applications can cause double

buffering
 OS keeps copy of page in memory as I/O buffer
 Application keeps page in memory for its own work

 Operating system can given direct access to the disk,

getting out of the way of the applications
 Raw disk mode
 Bypasses buffering, locking, etc
ALLOCATION OF FRAMES
 Each process needs minimum number of frames
 Example: IBM 370 – 6 pages to handle SS MOVE
instruction:
 instruction is 6 bytes, might span 2 pages
 2 pages to handle from
 2 pages to handle to

 Maximum of course is total frames in the system

 Two major allocation schemes
 fixed allocation
 priority allocation

 Many variations
GLOBAL VS. LOCAL ALLOCATION

 Global replacement – process selects a

replacement frame from the set of all frames;
one process can take a frame from another
 But then process execution time can vary greatly
 But greater throughput so more common

 Local replacement – each process selects

from only its own set of allocated frames
 More consistent per-process performance
 But possibly underutilized memory
NON-UNIFORM MEMORY ACCESS
 So far all memory accessed equally
 Many systems are NUMA – speed of access to memory
varies
 Consider system boards containing CPUs and memory,
interconnected over a system bus
 Optimal performance comes from allocating memory
“close to” the CPU on which the thread is scheduled
 And modifying the scheduler to schedule the thread on the
same system board when possible
 Solved by Solaris by creating lgroups
 Structure to track CPU / Memory low latency groups
 Used my schedule and pager
 When possible schedule all threads of a process and allocate all
memory for that process within the lgroup
ALLOCATING KERNEL MEMORY

 Treated differently from user memory

 Often allocated from a free-memory pool
 Kernel requests memory for structures of varying sizes
 Some kernel memory needs to be contiguous
 I.e. for device I/O
BUDDY SYSTEM
 Allocates memory from fixed-size segment consisting of
physically-contiguous pages
 Memory allocated using power-of-2 allocator
 Satisfies requests in units sized as power of 2
 Request rounded up to next highest power of 2
 When smaller allocation needed than is available, current chunk
split into two buddies of next-lower power of 2
 Continue until appropriate sized chunk available
 For example, assume 256KB chunk available, kernel requests
21KB
 Split into AL and AR of 128KB each
 One further divided into BL and BR of 64KB
 One further into CL and CR of 32KB each – one used to satisfy request

 Advantage – quickly coalesce unused chunks into larger

chunk
 Disadvantage - fragmentation
BUDDY SYSTEM ALLOCATOR
SLAB ALLOCATOR
 Alternate strategy
 Slab is one or more physically contiguous pages
 Cache consists of one or more slabs
 Single cache for each unique kernel data structure
 Each cache filled with objects – instantiations of the data
structure
 When cache created, filled with objects marked as
free
 When structures stored, objects marked as used
 If slab is full of used objects, next object allocated from
empty slab
 If no empty slabs, new slab allocated
 Benefits include no fragmentation, fast memory
request satisfaction
SLAB ALLOCATION
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS -- PREPAGING

 Prepaging
 To reduce the large number of page faults that occurs
at process startup
 Prepage all or some of the pages a process will need,
before they are referenced
 But if prepaged pages are unused, I/O and memory
was wasted
 Assume s pages are prepaged and α of the pages is
used
 Is cost of s * α save pages faults > or < than the cost of
prepaging
s * (1- α) unnecessary pages?
 α near zero  prepaging loses
 OTHER ISSUES – PAGE SIZE
 Sometimes OS designers have a choice
 Especially if running on custom-built CPU
 Page size selection must take into consideration:
 Fragmentation
 Page table size
 Resolution
 I/O overhead
 Number of page faults
 Locality
 TLB size and effectiveness
 Always power of 2, usually in the range 212 (4,096
bytes) to 222 (4,194,304 bytes)
 On average, growing over time
OTHER ISSUES – TLB REACH

 TLB Reach - The amount of memory accessible from

the TLB
 TLB Reach = (TLB Size) X (Page Size)
 Ideally, the working set of each process is stored in the
TLB
 Otherwise there is a high degree of page faults
 Increase the Page Size
 This may lead to an increase in fragmentation as not all
applications require a large page size
 Provide Multiple Page Sizes
 This allows applications that require larger page sizes the
opportunity to use them without an increase in
fragmentation
OTHER ISSUES – I/O INTERLOCK

 I/O Interlock – Pages

must sometimes be locked
into memory
 Consider I/O - Pages that
are used for copying a file
from a device must be
locked from being selected
for eviction by a page
replacement algorithm
 Pinning of pages to lock
into memory