What is the purpose of a dirty bit in memory management?

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What is the purpose of a dirty bit in memory management?

The purpose of a dirty bit in memory management is to track whether a page in memory has been modified or written to since it was last loaded from or written to the disk. It is a flag that is set by the operating system when a page is modified, indicating that the page needs to be written back to the disk before it can be evicted from memory. This helps in efficient memory management by reducing unnecessary disk I/O operations. When a page with a dirty bit set is evicted from memory, the operating system knows that it needs to write the modified page back to the disk to ensure data consistency.