CST 334 - Week 4 Journal, Memory Virtualization

During this fourth week of class we delved deeper into the subject of memory virtualization. I learned about paging, segmentation, external fragmentation, internal fragmentation, compaction, coalescing, best fit, worst fit, first fit, next fit, segregated lists, and so much more! One of the very main topics was paging, however. Paging is chopping up the memory space into fixed sized pieces and each fixed-size unit is called a page. We view physical memory as an array of fixed-sized slots called page frames. Each of these frames can contain a single virtual-memory page. Paging definitely improves flexibility as it supports the abstraction of an address space. It also improves simplicity. There is so much more I could talk about what I learned about page tables, different kinds of bits, TLBs, cache replacement, and so much more. However, I hope this gives a brief overview of what I learned up to an extent.