Memory Management

Memory management is hard because physical memory is finite while the demand on it is not. The chapter runs from direct allocation to virtualization. It opens with the basics — loading, linking, logical versus physical addresses, and privilege-based protection — then compares contiguous allocation and its fragmentation with non-contiguous allocation and its sharing, and closes with virtual memory: demand paging, replacement, the working set, and thrashing. You should finish able to explain address translation, compare the two allocation strategies, and describe how virtual memory trades capacity against speed.