What is the difference between Swapping and Paging?

Swapping occurs when whole process is transferred to disk,while paging is when some part of process is transferred to disk while rest is still in physical memory. There are two utilities to onitor memory, called vmstat (for bsd, etc),sar( for system V, etc). Page-ins and page-outs are pages
moved in and out from physical memory to disk, swap-ins and swap-outs are processes moved in and out of disk.

4 comments:

  1. What is a page ?
    --Its basic unit of handling memory with unit page == 4 kb, normally kernel and cpu handle data interms of PAGES

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  2. What is swapping ?

    --If a process needs to bring a virtual page into physical memory and there are no free physical pages available, the operating system must make room for this page by discarding another page from physical memory.

    If the page to be discarded from physical memory came from an image or data file and has not been written to then the page does not need to be saved. Instead it can be discarded and brought back into memory from the original image or data file if it is needed again.

    However, if the page has been modified, the operating system must preserve the contents of that page so that it can be accessed at a later time. This type of page is known as a dirty page. When dirty pages are removed from memory, they are saved in a special sort of file called the swap file. Since access to the swap file takes a long time relative to the speed of the processor and physical memory, the operating system must juggle the need to write pages to disk with the need to retain them in memory.

    If the swap algorithm, which is used to decide which pages to discard or swap is not efficient, then a condition known as thrashing occurs. In the case of thrashing, pages are constantly being written to and read back from disk. This causes the operating system to be too busy to perform enough real work. If, for example, physical page frame number 1 in Figure 3.1 is being regularly accessed then it is not a good candidate for swapping to hard disk. The set of pages that a process is currently using is called the working set. An efficient swap scheme would make sure that all processes have their working set in physical memory.

    Linux uses a Least Recently Used (LRU) page aging technique to fairly choose pages which might be removed from the system. This scheme involves every page in the system having an age which changes as the page is accessed. The more that a page is accessed, the younger it is; the less that it is accessed, the older and more stale it becomes. Old pages are good candidates for swapping.

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  3. What is Demand Paging ?

    --As there is much less physical memory than virtual memory the operating system must be careful that it does not use the physical memory inefficiently. One way to save physical memory is to only load virtual pages that are currently being used by the executing program. For example, a database program may be run to query a database. In this case not all of the database needs to be loaded into memory, just those data records that are being examined. If the database query is a search query then it does not make sense to load the code from the database program that deals with adding new records. This technique of only loading virtual pages into memory as they are accessed is known as demand paging.

    When a process attempts to access a virtual address that is not currently in memory, the processor cannot find a page table entry for the virtual page being referenced. For example, in Figure 3.1 there is no entry in process X's page table for virtual page frame number 2 and so if process X attempts to read from an address within virtual page frame number 2 the processor cannot translate the address into a physical one. At this point the processor notifies the operating system that a page fault has occurred.

    If the faulting virtual address is invalid this means that the process has attempted to access a virtual address that it should not have. Maybe the application has gone wrong in some way, for example writing to random addresses in memory. In this case the operating system will terminate it, protecting the other processes in the system from this rogue process.

    If the faulting virtual address was valid but the page that it refers to is not currently in memory, the operating system must bring the appropriate page into memory from the image on disk. Disk access takes a long time, relatively speaking, and so the process must wait quite a while until the page has been fetched. If there are other processes that could run, then the operating system will select one of them to run. The fetched page is written into a free physical page frame and an entry for the virtual page frame number is added to the process' page table. The process is then restarted at the machine instruction where the memory fault occurred. This time the virtual memory access is made, the processor can make the virtual to physical address translation and so the process continues to run.

    Linux uses demand paging to load executable images into a process's virtual memory. Whenever a command is executed, the file containing it is opened and its contents are mapped into the process's virtual memory. This is done by modifying the data structures describing this process' memory map and is known as memory mapping. However, only the first part of the image is actually brought into physical memory. The rest of the image is left on disk. As the image executes, it generates page faults and Linux uses the process's memory map in order to determine which parts of the image to bring into memory for execution.

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  4. Hi Vaseem,


    Jeez oh man, while I applaud for your writing , it’s just so damn straight to the point Linux Queries.


    I have a net book Samsung N150plus,and sometimes I'm having problems with google that crashes and close, even is a bit slow as I'm going to a 2gb ram also, I had re installed it several times but someone told me to install a Linux software on my net book,
    can i?are there any disadvantages?
    Please keep providing such valuable information.


    Obrigado,
    Abhiram

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