Memory Management Between Windows & Linux

Differences in Memory Mangement Between Windows & Linux

Jim Hintz

POS/355

2/17/2014

Terance Carlson

Differences in Memory Management Between Windows & Linux

This paper is going to try and explain some of the differences of memory between two operating systems. It will describe the different memory organization between the two operating systems. Windows has become a huge household and business name for the entire world. Linux is still an up and coming name in the huge technology market but becoming more and more popular.

I would like to think that the Memory Management System is a highly important part of an operating system. The basic function of this system is to help manage the memory hierarchy of RAM and hard disks that are available on a machine. It’s more important role that it plays also includes allocation and sometimes deallocation of memory. This system also needs to take care of Virtual Memory by utilizing hard disks as extra RAM.

The idea of Virtual Memory was to provide an application program the illusion of having large amount of memory available to be used. Thus a kernel would provide by being able to make use of the secondary storage (hard disk) to fulfill the required extra space.

In order for virtual memory to function properly, it requires to a mapping function that performs unique address translation, conversion of virtual address to the physical location, and also the physical address is where the location of the memory is passed down to the local memory bus. This type of function is typically called Paging, or Segmentation, or both, it does however depend on the kernel, processor and the architecture.

Windows uses a few different options for memory management. One is called virtual memory manager which was explained above. Another is called lazy allocation which is a process that tries to avoid allocating its memory until it is actually necessary. A third is called prefetching, this I believe is used when moving pages from...