Memory paging
memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory
In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that introduces a level of indirection between physical and logical addresses and allows the physical memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation.
Paging is often combined with the related technique of allocating and freeing page frames and storing pages on and retrieving them from secondary storage in order to allow the aggregate size of the address spaces to exceed the physical memory of the system. For historical reasons, this technique is sometimes referred to as swapping.
When combined with virtual memory, it is known as paged virtual memory.
In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in blocks of the same size (pages).
Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementations in modern operating systems, using secondary storage to let programs exceed the size of available physical memory.
Hardware support is necessary for efficient translation of logical addresses to physical addresses. As such, paged memory functionality is usually hardwired into a CPU through its Memory Management Unit (MMU) or Memory Protection Unit (MPU), and separately enabled by privileged system code in the operating system's kernel. In CPUs implementing the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) for instance, the memory paging is enabled via the CR0 control register.
The public source identifies “Memory paging” as memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Memory, paging and memory.
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This entry incorporates text from “Memory paging” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.