Memory Management Techniques in Modern Operating Systems: A Review

Abstract

Modern operating systems need to manage memory effectively for a range of applications. Memory management deals with large, fast, and very cheap volatile storage; dealing with many programs, each with their own memory needs and characteristics; operating on a shared medium; and doing all of the above efficiently across the hardware/software boundary. In order to manage memory, operating systems must support abstraction and provide security through separations; facilitate efficient allocation; ensure that memory can accommodate instruction streams to exploit locality and minimize latency; and allocate based on actual usage to keep the memory hierarchy, caches, and CPUs busy and reduce swapping or compression (Andrew Shidal, 2016). Memory management has changed over time; originally systems were small enough to store directly in RAM, then abstracted to the notion of segments (basic CM usage), and now layer on virtual memory (David Berger, 2002). In modern systems, locality is more than an allocation problem; the CPU interacts with memory through caches that layer on top of the memory hierarchy. Similarly, evolving programming languages and hardware abstractions create new dimensions of memory management: global memory, multiple threads, off-chip memory and GPUs, and languages with their own automated memory managers.

Keywords: Modern operating systems, memory, Paging