Virtual Memory Management

UPDATED: We'll focus on the course text for our first exploration of virtual memory.

Readings

• Chapter 6 in the course text (Hailperin)

The Hailperin provides a general overview of the area of memory management.

Questions

In the "Exercises" section, spend some time on the following questions, and submit your work to Moodle in Markdown format. I've copied the questions from the text so you can reference them here. I've focused on conceptual questions for our first reading, and we'll play games drawing page tables and linking them later.

Question 6.3: I mentioned that typical page sizes have grown over the decades. Brainstorm considerations that would make smaller pages better than larger pages and other considerations that would make larger pages better than smaller. Now think about what has changed over the decades. Can you identify any argument favor- ing small pages that has weakened over time? Can you identify any argument favoring large pages that has strengthened over time? Presumably, these factors account for the historical trend in page sizes. On the other hand, you may also be able to identify one or more factors that would have suggested the reverse trend; if so, they were presumably outweighed.

Question 6.11: Figure 6.19 on page 210 shows a small example where LRU has a lower miss rate than FIFO replacement. Develop an example of similar size in which FIFO has a lower miss rate than LRU.

Question 6.12: In Figure 6.19 on page 210, both LRU and FIFO replacement have higher miss rates than OPT. Develop an example of similar size in which at least one of LRU and FIFO has as low a miss rate as OPT does.

Submission

As always, written work should be submitted as a Markdown document (.md) or a compressed file containing the LaTeX source of your report (.tar.gz) and a compiled PDF of the output. LaTeX submissions should be sources only, without temporary files (.aux, .log, etc.).

On Linux, you might use UberWriter or ReText for Markdown, and on Windows, MarkdownPad. Any editor works for LaTeX, although some prefer tools that are designed for the purpose.

Assignment: Hailperin VMM (Chapter 6)

Naming Convention: username-vmm-hailperin

Moodle Link: http://moodle2.berea.edu/course/view.php?id=2243

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