Segmentation
Segmentation
An important aspect of memory management that became unavoidable with paging is the separation of the user's view of memory and the actual physical memory. As we have already seen, the user's view of memory is not the same as the actual physical memory. The user's view is mapped onto physical memory. This mapping allows differentiation between logical memory and. physical memory.
Basic Method
Do users think of memory as a linear array of bytes, some containing instructions and others containing data? Most people would say no. Rather, users prefer to view memory as a collection of variable-sized segments., with no necessary ordering among segments (Figure 8.18).
Consider how you think of a program when you are writing it. You think of it as a main program with a set of methods, procedures, or functions. It may also include various data structures: objects, arrays, stacks, variables, and so on. Each of these modules or data elements is referred to by name. You talk about "the stack," "the math library," ''the main program," without caring what addresses in memory these elements occupy You are not concerned with whether the stack is stored before or after the Sqrt () function. Each of these segments is of variable length; the length is intrinsically defined by the purpose of the segment in the program. Elements within a segment are identified by their offset from the beginning of the segment: the first statement of the program, the seventh stack frame entry in the stack, the fifth instruction of the Sqrt (), and so on. Segmentation is a memory-management scheme that supports this user view of memory. A logical address space is a collection of segments. Each segment has a name and a length. The addresses specify both the segment name and the offset within the segment. The user therefore specifies each address by two quantities: a segment name and an offset. (Contrast this scheme with the paging scheme, in which the user specifies only a single address, which is partitioned by the hardware into a page number and an offset, all invisible to the programmer.) For simplicity of implementation, segments are numbered and are referred to by a segment number, rather than by a segment name. Tluis, a logical address consists of a two tuple:
< segment-number, offset >.
Normally, the user program is compiled, and the compiler automatically constructs segments reflecting the input program. A C compiler might create separate segments for the following:
1. The code
2. Global variables
3. The heap, from which memory is allocated
4. The stacks used, by each thread
5. The standard C library
Libraries that are linked in during compile time might be assigned separate segments. The loader would take all these segments and assign them segment numbers.
Hardware
Although the user can now refer to objects in the program by a two-dimensional address, the actual physical memory is still, of course, a one-dimensional sequence of bytes. Thus, we must define an implementation to map twodimensional user-defined addresses into one-dimensional physical addresses. This .mapping is effected by a segment table. Each entry in the segment table has a segment base and a segment limit. The segment base contains the starting physical address where the segment resides in memory, whereas the segment limit specifies the length of the segment. The use of a segment table is illustrated in Figure 8.19. A logical address consists of two parts: a segment number, s, and an offset into that segment, d. The segment number is used as an index to the segment table. The offset d of the logical address must be between 0 and the segment limit. If it is not, we trap to the operating system (logical addressing attempt beyond, end of segment). When an offset is legal, it is added to the segment base to produce the address in physical memory of the desired byte. The segment table is thus essentially an array of base-limit register pairs.
As an example, consider the situation shown in Figure 8.20. We have five segments numbered from 0 through 4. The segments are stored in physical memory as shown.
The segment table has a separate entry for each segment, giving the beginning address of the segment in physical memory (or base) and the length of that segment (or limit). For example, segment 2 is 400 bytes long and begins at location 4300. Thus, a reference to byte 53 of segment 2 is mapped onto location 4300 + 53 = 4353. A reference to segment 3r byte 852, is mapped to 3200 (the base of segment 3) + 852 = 4052. A reference to byte 1222 of segment 0 would result in a trap to the operating system, as this segment is only 1,000 bytes long.
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