Memory Management Introduction
Memory management is a critical aspect of the Linux operating system, responsible for efficient utilization of the system’s physical and virtual memory resources. At its core, memory management in Linux involves handling memory requests from processes, allocating and deallocating memory blocks, and ensuring efficient usage of available memory.
Some key components of Linux memory management:
- Virtual Memory: Linux uses a virtual memory system that provides each process with the illusion of having its private memory space. Virtual memory enables the system to run more applications than the physically available memory by swapping inactive portions of application memory to disk.
- Paging: Both physical and virtual memory are divided into fixed-size blocks called pages. This paging system allows efficient management of memory and enables the swapping mechanism between RAM and disk.
- Memory Allocation: When a process requests memory, the memory manager is responsible for allocating a suitable block of memory to fulfill the request. The memory might be taken from available physical memory or, if needed, by swapping some inactive memory pages onto disk to free up physical memory.
- Kernel Space and User Space: Linux memory is divided…
