CST334 Week 3 Report

 CST334: Weekly Learning Summary Pt. III

This week, we learned a ton in Operating Systems. We learned mostly about how the OS virtualizes memory. In essence, we are looking at how the OS utilizes hardware based address translation. The OS creates an easy to use abstraction of memory by way of the address space: this space contains all the memory state of the running program: the code, the stack, the heap, etc. Each process has not a real memory address, but rather a virtual memory address that must be translated into a real, physical memory address by the OS whenever we are creating or modifying a process.With dynamic relocation, we use a base register to transform virtual addresses into physical addresses; furthermore, a bounds register ensures that addresses are within the confines of the address space.These base and bounds registers are typically managed by a part of the CPU known as the memory management unit, or MMU. On an important note, both internal and external fragmentation are necessary evils in this address translation model, and our job as computer scientists is to try to minimize these while managing memory.