Os Memory Management Questions
Demand paging is a memory management technique used by operating systems to efficiently allocate and manage memory resources. It involves loading pages into memory only when they are demanded or accessed by a process, rather than loading the entire program into memory at once.
In demand paging, the operating system divides the program into fixed-size pages and stores them on secondary storage, such as a hard disk. When a process requests a page that is not currently in memory, a page fault occurs. The operating system then retrieves the required page from secondary storage and loads it into an available page frame in physical memory.
Demand paging allows for efficient memory utilization as only the necessary pages are loaded into memory, reducing the amount of physical memory required. It also enables the execution of larger programs that may not fit entirely in memory.
However, demand paging can introduce some overhead due to the time required to retrieve pages from secondary storage. To mitigate this, operating systems often employ techniques such as page replacement algorithms to determine which pages to evict from memory when it becomes full.
Overall, demand paging provides a flexible and efficient approach to memory management by dynamically loading pages into memory as needed, optimizing resource utilization and enabling the execution of larger programs.