8. Is the Process before and after the swap are the same? Give reason.
Process before swapping is residing in the primary memory in its original form. The regions (text, data and stack) may not be occupied fully by the process, there may be few empty slots in any of the regions and while swapping Kernel do not bother about the empty slots while swapping the process out.
After swapping the process resides in the swap (secondary memory) device. The regions swapped out will be present but only the occupied region slots but not the empty slots that were present before assigning.
While swapping the process once again into the main memory, the Kernel referring to the Process Memory Map, it assigns the main memory accordingly taking care of the empty slots in the regions.
9. What is the difference between Swapping and Paging?
Swapping: Whole process is moved from the swap device to the main memory for execution. Process size must be less than or equal to the available main memory. It is easier to implementation and overhead to the system. Swapping systems does not handle the memory more flexibly as compared to the paging systems.
Paging: Only the required memory pages are moved to main memory from the swap device for execution. Process size does not matter. Gives the concept of the virtual memory. It provides greater flexibility in mapping the virtual address space into the physical memory of the machine. Allows more number of processes to fit in the main memory simultaneously. Allows the greater process size than the available physical memory. Demand paging systems handle the memory more flexibly.
10. What is major difference between the Historic Unix and the new BSD release of Unix System V in terms of Memory Management?
Historic Unix uses Swapping - entire process is transferred to the main memory from the swap device, whereas the Unix System V uses Demand Paging - only the part of the process is moved to the main memory. Historic Unix uses one Swap Device and Unix System V allow multiple Swap Devices.
11. What is the main goal of the Memory Management?
- It decides which process should reside in the main memory,
- Manages the parts of the virtual address space of a process which is non-core resident,
- Monitors the available main memory and periodically write the processes into the swap device to provide more processes fit in the main memory simultaneously.
12. What scheme does the Kernel in Unix System V follow while choosing a swap device among the multiple swap devices?
Kernel follows Round Robin scheme choosing a swap device among the multiple swap devices in Unix System V.
13. What are the entities that are swapped out of the main memory while swapping the process out of the main memory?
All memory space occupied by the process, process's u-area, and Kernel stack are swapped out, theoretically.
Practically, if the process's u-area contains the Address Translation Tables for the process then Kernel implementations do not swap the u-area.
14. What are the criteria for choosing a process for swapping into memory from the swap device?
The resident time of the processes in the swap device, the priority of the processes and the amount of time the processes had been swapped out.
Unix Memory Management question and answer for interview