Hello everyone, I trust y'all doing great over there. Today, I am writing about Memory Segmentation.
Memory Segmentation is a type of memory management technique in Operation Systems. Just before we talk about what memory segmentation is, let us first know what Memory Management means.
WHAT IS MEMORY MANAGEMENT?
Memory management is simply a process of allocation and deallocation of memory to software applications, tasks, services, etc that run in an Operation System.
Memory management helps in allocating a partition to a task or job when it starts to run, and then unallocate it when it ends for the use of other programs and tasks. Memory manager is also used to monitor the status of memory locations, whether it is free or allocated.
WHAT IS MEMORY SEGMENTATION
Memory Segmentation is a type of memory management technique that divides the computer memory into segments and allocate these segments to processes.
Memory Segmentation can also be said to as the partitioning of processes and load them into different non-contiguous address spaces in memory. They are referenced using memory addresses.
Segments are completely independent address spaces. Each segment consists of a linear sequence of addresses, from zero to a maximum number. The length of a segment may be increased whenever something is pushed onto the stack or queue, and decreases when something is popped off the stack or queue.
Segmentation With Paging
If the segments are large, it may be unconvinent to keep them in main memory (RAM) in their entirety which leads to the idea of paging them so that only the pages that are needed will be allowed in the main memory (RAM)
Advantages of Memory Segmentation
- Memory Segmentation handles and simfies data structure.
- Memory Segmentation simplifies separately linked up compiled procedures.
- With segmentation, shairng of data between processes is facilitated.
- Different segments can be given different data protection such as 'Execute only', 'Read/Write', etc.
Disadvantages of Memory Segmentation
- A list of free pages are kept my Paging.
- Segments that are not of equal sizes are not suitable for swapping.
- Memory Segmentation is costly.
- There exists external fragmentation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, memory segmentation is a fundamental concept in operating systems. It plays a very important role in organizing and managing a computer's memory efficiently, so as to allow different programs, services, and processes to run concurrently without interfering with one another.
By dividing memory into segments and assigning them specific access rights, segmentation enhances both security and multitasking capabilities.
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