CST 334 - Week 4

This week's module covered more on memory virtualization, building on what was learned last week. The readings for this week covered paging, page tables, swapping mechanisms, and translation lookaside buffers, to name a few. Along with the readings, the lab provided more information on MMUs (Memory Management Unit) and paging. Part of the resources for this week included additional information on virtual memory and why is is important. Virtual memory are methods that give processes more memory than is physically available, or makes the computer appear that it does. An fundamental aspect to this is paging, which is a process that involves copying the contents of pages to a disk in order to release them for other pages to use. Another important aspect of paging is the use of a page table. The page table stores address translations for each of the virtual pages of the address space. These page tables are then stored into OS virtual memory. Part of our lab for this week had us practice paging calculations, which included calculating the bits needed to represent the pages in our virtual address space, page frames in our physical address space, and full physical address among other calculations. Overall, I gained a better understanding of memory virtualization in the OS.