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Memory requirements are defined after considering demands of the application, operating system, supporting software and files, and other running processes. Optimal performance of other unrelated software running on a multi-tasking computer system is also considered when defining this requirement.
The Multics operating system is probably the best known system implementing segmented memory. Multics segments are subdivisions of the computer's physical memory of up to 256 pages, each page being 1K 36-bit words in size, resulting in a maximum segment size of 1MiB (with 9-bit bytes, as used in Multics). A process could have up to 4046 segments.
An external memory interface is a bus protocol for communication from an integrated circuit, such as a microprocessor, to an external memory device located on a circuit board. The memory is referred to as external because it is not contained within the internal circuitry of the integrated circuit and thus is externally located on the circuit board.
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU). [ 1 ] Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output , it is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus ...
When the operating system requested memory to load a program, or a program requested more memory to hold data from a file for instance, it would call the memory handling library. This examined the mappings to look for an area in main memory large enough to hold the request. If such a block was found, a new entry was entered into the table.
Memory-mapped I/O is preferred in IA-32 and x86-64 based architectures because the instructions that perform port-based I/O are limited to one register: EAX, AX, and AL are the only registers that data can be moved into or out of, and either a byte-sized immediate value in the instruction or a value in register DX determines which port is the source or destination port of the transfer.
Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
The operating system intercepts the page fault, loads the required memory page, and the application continues as if no fault had occurred. This scheme, a type of virtual memory , allows in-memory data not currently in use to be moved to secondary storage and back in a way which is transparent to applications, to increase overall memory capacity.