Unix Memory Management question and answer for interview

28. What is Page-Stealer process?
This is the Kernel process that makes rooms for the incoming pages, by swapping the memory pages that are not the part of the working set of a process. Page-Stealer is created by the Kernel at the system initialization and invokes it throughout the lifetime of the system. Kernel locks a region when a process faults on a page in the region, so that page stealer cannot steal the page, which is being faulted in.

29. Name two paging states for a page in memory? The two paging states are:

  1. The page is aging and is not yet eligible for swapping,
  2. The page is eligible for swapping but not yet eligible for reassignment to other virtual address space.

30. What is the working set of a process?
The set of pages that are referred by the process in the last "n", references, where "n" is called the window of the working set of the process.

31. What is the window of the working set of a process?
The window of the working set of a process is the total number in which the process had referred the set of pages in the working set of the process.

32. What are the phases of swapping a page from the memory?

  1. Page stealer finds the page eligible for swapping and places the page number in the list of pages to be swapped.
  2. Kernel copies the page to a swap device when necessary and clears the valid bit in the page table entry, decrements the pfdata reference count, and places the pfdata table entry at the end of the free list if its reference count is 0.

33. At what mode the fault handler executes?
At the Kernel Mode.

34. What do you mean by the protection fault?
Protection fault refers to the process accessing the pages, which do not have the access permission. A process also incur the protection fault when it attempts to write a page whose copy on write bit was set during the fork() system call.

35. How the Kernel handles the copy on write bit of a page, when the bit is set?
In situations like, where the copy on write bit of a page is set and that page is shared by more than one process, the Kernel allocates new page and copies the content to the new page and the other processes retain their references to the old page. After copying the Kernel updates the page table entry with the new page number. Then Kernel decrements the reference count of the old pfdata table entry.
In cases like, where the copy on write bit is set and no processes are sharing the page, the Kernel allows the physical page to be reused by the processes. By doing so, it clears the copy on write bit and disassociates the page from its disk copy (if one exists), because other process may share the disk copy. Then it removes the pfdata table entry from the page-queue as the new copy of the virtual page is not on the swap device. It decrements the swap-use count for the page and if count drops to 0, frees the swap space.

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Unix Memory Management question and answer for interview