CODEWITHSUNDEEP
memoryoperating-system
jacksparrow007
jacksparrow007

Reputation: 1328

Virtual memory without secondary storage

Can you have virtual memory without a secondary storage ( hard disk ) ?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 764

Answers (1)

K. Brafford
K. Brafford

Reputation: 3839

In a pure sense, yes you can: Virtual Memory

What makes memory virtual is the fact that all memory accesses by the process are intercepted at the CPU level and a hardware Memory Management Unit is used to manage a mapping of the process address space onto the physical memory, no matter where that storage is presently really located.

You can have computing systems with virtual memory that have no backing storage (which is what people call it when you can move pages of memory out to disk for later retrieval).

In this case, the virtual memory system is used to allow the OS to intercept and prevent illegal memory references, but not in order to increase the working-set size of processes beyond the amount of installed physical memory.

Upvotes: 6

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