Memory Management Requirements

Memory Management Requirements

Memory management is the action performed by the Operating System and Hardware that allocates and reallocates blocks of memory for programs or processes in/out of main memory and secondary memory. This is needed to accommodate multi-processing. Basically a program or process requests a block of memory, depending the size of the request, the memory manager allocates this request in main memory. There are five requirements of Memory management. These requirements consist of Relocation, Protection, Sharing, Logical and Physical organization.

Relocation refers to the swapping of processes in/out of memory locations. There is no way a programmer knows when the program will be used, so the program has to have an address translator to bring the programs in/out of different locations of memory. Also, a program may need to access more than one memory location depending on the size of memory needed.

Memory protection is essential, because, it protects the computer memory from being accessed knowingly or with harmful intentions. Also, it protects a process from being accessed by another process. At times, different processes need to share the same memory location without any interruptions. Memory sharing allows different programs to share the same location in memory without the user noticing any kind of delays.

Logical organization of main memory is done in one line address spacing. Most of the time a programmer uses modules to organize memory so they can be written, compiled, read-only, or execute-only. Computer memory consist of two levels. The first level is main memory. This level is very volatile, but provides speedy access. When there is loss of power, main memory is lost. The second level of memory is secondary memory and is non-volatile. When power is lost this memory is retained. Secondary memory is cheater and much slower than main memory. Most processes use both levels of memory. The organization of the flow of data...