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Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process ...
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1] : 105–208. The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they ...
Cooperative memory management, used by many early operating systems, assumes that all programs make voluntary use of the kernel's memory manager, and do not exceed their allocated memory. This system of memory management is almost never seen any more, since programs often contain bugs which can cause them to exceed their allocated memory.
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory". The computer's operating system, using a combination of hardware and software ...
A translation lookaside buffer ( TLB) is a memory cache that stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory. It is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. [1] It can be called an address-translation cache. It is a part of the chip's memory-management unit (MMU).
Instruction cycle. The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch-execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the ...
Definition. Peter Denning (1968) defines "the working set of information of a process at time to be the collection of information referenced by the process during the process time interval ". [2] Typically the units of information in question are considered to be memory pages. This is suggested to be an approximation of the set of pages that ...
Execution of process creation system call by a running process. A user request to create a new process. Initiation of a batch job. When an operating system is booted, typically several processes are created. Some of these are foreground processes, that interact with a (human) user and perform work for them.