- A multiprogramming operating system kernel must be responsible for managing all system memory .
- Cooperative memory management, used by many early operating systems assumes that all programs make voluntary use of the kernel's memory manager, and do not exceed their allocated memory.
- If a program fails it may cause memory used by one or more other programs to be affected or overwritten.Malicious programs, or viruses may purposefully alter another program's memory.
- Memory protection enables the kernel to limit a process' access to the computer's memory.
- In both segmentation and paging, certain protected mode registers specify to the CPU what memory address it should allow a running program to access. Attempts to access other addresses will trigger an interrupt which will cause the CPU to re-enter supervisor mode, placing the kernel in charge. This is called a segmentation violation or Seg-V for short, A general protection fault would be produced indicating a segmentation violation had occurred, however the system would often crash anyway.
- In most Linux systems, part of the hard disk is reserved for virtual memory when the Operating system is being installed on the system. This part is known as swap space. Windows systems use a swap file instead of a partition.
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