Memory Management Requirements

Memory Management Requirements

Mai Nguyen

POS/355

August 4, 2014

Brian Davis

Memory Management Requirements

In today’s computer marketplace, suppliers are constantly looking for ways to boost overall system performance in their computing products. Memory management is the means by which an operating system allocates a computer’s memory and when done effectively enables suppliers to gain a competitive advantage. In its broadest sense, memory management is the coordination of memory between hardware, programs, and applications.

Memory is a vital component in a computer system because the operating system and virtually all programs and/or applications load into memory prior to being executed. Memory management allows portions of memory to be allocated among the various processes upon request and subsequently frees this same memory up when it’s no longer needed to be used for other processes. Memory management is typically broken down into several mechanisms or requirements for discussion: relocation, sharing, protection, logical organization, and physical organization.

Since memory is shared between any numbers of processes in a multiprogramming system, the programmer simply has no way of predicting where their program might be placed in memory for execution. Upon execution, processes are sometimes swapped or moved in and out of the main memory – referred to as relocation. To overcome this obstacle, memory references are incorporated into the code so that the processor hardware and operating systems can locate the actual physical memory addresses. “The processor hardware and operating system software must be able to translate the memory references found in the code of the program into actual physical memory addresses, reflecting the current location of the program in main memory” (Stallings, 2012).

Simultaneous process execution coupled with the unpredictability of memory location introduces another obstacle – how do we prevent...