Thursday, December 13, 2007

Assingment #3

What is the cause of thrashing? How does the system detect thrashing? Once it detects thrashing, what can the system do to eliminate this problem?
- Thrashing is caused by under allocation of the minimum number of pages required by a process, forcing it to continuously page fault. The system can detect thrashing by evaluating the level of CPU utilization as compared to the level of multiprogramming. It can be eliminated by reducing the level of multiprogramming.

a.) Multi programming:
Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing. It allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical parallelism. The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to another job. So the main idea here is that the CPU is never idle.

b.) Internal Fragmentation:
Internal fragmentation is the space wasted inside of allocated memory blocks because of restriction on the allowed sizes of allocated blocks. Allocated memory may be slightly larger than requested memory; this size difference is memory internal to a partition, but not being used.

c.) External Fragmentation:
External Fragmentation happens when a dynamic memory allocation algorithm allocates some memory and a small piece is left over that cannot be effectively used. If too much external fragmentation occurs, the amount of usable memory is drastically reduced. Total memory space exists to satisfy a request, but it is not contiguous.

d.) Compaction
e.) Relocation


2.)The advantages of the four memory allocation are as follows:
- It avoids wastage of CPU idle time
- Operating system is easy to implement
3.)The disadvantages of the four memory allocation are as follows:
- degree of multiprogramming is fixed
- only 1 job per partition
- waste of main storage
- some partitions not used
http://www.techinterviews.com/?p=170

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