Virtual memory

Virtual memory is a process of using back up memory such as a hard drive as main high speed memory, by storing data on the back up memory in blocks known as pages which typically hold about 4Kb.

When the process refers to a memory location, system hardware detects if the location is in memory - if not it generates an interrupt, and the required data is transferred from the backing memory to the system memory.

It is used so that a process "sees" more main memory than is actually assigned to it.

© 1998 Ron Turner

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