Operating Systems · Memory virtualization

Virtual memory and page replacement

Letting total memory usage exceed physical RAM by swapping pages to disk, and deciding which page to evict.

Also known as: demand paging, page faults, LRU, clock algorithm, swapping.

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• Paging: Splitting memory into fixed-size pages so a process's address space doesn't need to sit in one contiguous block.

Related topics

• Free-space memory allocation: How the OS carves up physical memory among processes, and tracks the resulting free space.