Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Memory paging. In computer operating systems, memory paging (or swapping on some Unix-like systems) is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage [a] for use in main memory. [citation needed] In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called ...
A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in a page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in an operating system that uses virtual memory. Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory ...
In a computer operating system that uses paging for virtual memory management, page replacement algorithms decide which memory pages to page out, sometimes called swap out, or write to disk, when a page of memory needs to be allocated. Page replacement happens when a requested page is not in memory (page fault) and a free page cannot be used to ...
The page table is a key component of virtual address translation that is necessary to access data in memory. The page table is set up by the computer's operating system, and may be read and written during the virtual address translation process by the memory management unit or by low-level system software or firmware.
Page cache. In computing, a page cache, sometimes also called disk cache, [1] is a transparent cache for the pages originating from a secondary storage device such as a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). The operating system keeps a page cache in otherwise unused portions of the main memory (RAM), resulting in quicker access to ...
Copy-on-write. Copy-on-write (COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing[1] or shadowing, [2] is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources [3] (most commonly memory pages, storage sectors, files, and data structures).
Memory management unit. A memory management unit (MMU), sometimes called paged memory management unit (PMMU), [1] is a computer hardware unit that examines all memory references on the memory bus, translating these requests, known as virtual memory addresses, into physical addresses in main memory. In modern systems, programs generally have ...
Physical Address Extension. In computing, Physical Address Extension (PAE), sometimes referred to as Page Address Extension, [1] is a memory management feature for the x86 architecture. PAE was first introduced by Intel in the Pentium Pro, and later by AMD in the Athlon processor. [2] It defines a page table hierarchy of three levels (instead ...