OS Support
This lesson identifies the issues that the operating system can face as a result of segmentation. Additionally, it also highlights the approaches that the operating system takes to handle those issues.
You now should have a basic idea as to how segmentation works. Pieces of the address space are relocated into physical memory as the system runs, and thus a huge savings of physical memory is achieved relative to our simpler approach with just a single base/bounds pair for the entire address space. Specifically, all the unused space between the stack and the heap need not be allocated in physical memory, allowing us to fit more address spaces into physical memory and support a large and sparse virtual address space per process.
Context switch
However, segmentation raises a number of new issues for the operating system. The first is an old one: what should the OS do on a context switch? You should have a good guess by now: the segment registers must be saved and restored. Clearly, each process has its own virtual address space, and the OS must make sure to set up these registers correctly before letting the process run again.
How OS deals with the growth or shrinkage of a segment
The second is OS interaction when segments grow (or perhaps shrink). For example, a program may call malloc() to allocate an object. In some cases, the existing heap will be able to service the request, and thus malloc() will find free space for the object and return a pointer to it to the caller. In others, however, the heap segment itself may need to grow. In this case, the memory-allocation library will perform a system call to grow the heap (e.g., the traditional UNIX sbrk() system call). The OS will then (usually) provide more space, updating the segment size register to the new (bigger) size, and informing the library of success; the library can then allocate space for the new object and return successfully to the calling program. Do note that the OS could reject the request, if no more physical memory is available, or if it decides that the calling process already has too much.
Management of free space
The last, and perhaps most important, issue is managing free space in physical memory. When a new address space is created, the OS has to be able to find space in physical memory for its segments. Previously, we assumed that each address space was the same size, and thus physical memory could be thought of as a bunch of slots where processes would fit in. Now, we have a number of segments per process, and each segment might be a different size.
The general problem that arises is that physical memory quickly becomes full of little holes of free space, making it difficult to allocate new segments, or to grow existing ones. We call this problem
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