Joseph N. Cleveland Jr.
University of Phoenix
Introduction to Operating Systems
POS/355
John Vassar
June 26, 2013
Memory management is an important characteristic of an operating system. Main memory is divided into two parts one for resident programs, and the other for the program currently in use. The user part must be subdivided to accommodate multiple processes (Stallings, 2012). When a few processes are in the memory then much of the time all of the processes will have to wait for input /output and the processor will be idle. According to Stallings (2012),. The requirements that memory management is supposed to satisfy are Relocation, Protection, Sharing, Logical organization, and Physical …show more content…
The operating systems job is managing the memory. The operating system is in charge of bringing this process into main memory (Stallings, 2012). However the processor must deal with references within the program. Branch instructions include an address to reference the order to be executed next. Data reference instructions include the address of the byte or word of data referenced. The processor hardware and operating system software must be able to translate the memory references found in the code of the program into actual physical memory addresses, reflecting the current location of the program in main memory. (Stallings, 2012).
Protection is the next requirement to be satisfied. Protection deals with security against unwanted interference by other processes. Programs from other process should not be able to access memory locations in a process for reading or writing Purposes without permission. The processor must be able to abort such instructions at the point of execution.
Sharing allows several processes to access the same portion of main memory (Stallings, 2012). When there are a number of processes executing the same program it is beneficial to allow each process to access the same copy of the program rather than have its own separate copy (Stallings, 2012,). The memory management system must therefore