Section 8.1. Virtual Memory Primer

8.1. Virtual Memory Primer

A virtual memory (VM) system offers the following benefits:

• It presents a simple memory programming model to applications so that application developers need not know how the underlying memory hardware is arranged.

• It allows processes to see linear ranges of bytes in their address space, regardless of the physical layout or fragmentation of the real memory.

• It affords a programming model with a larger memory size than that of available physical storage (e.g., RAM) and enables the use of slower but larger secondary storage (e.g., disk) as a backing store to hold the pieces of memory that don't fit in physical memory.