What is virtual memory? – Gary explains

hello my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority it seemed today everything has the word virtual stuck in front of it we had virtual reality we have virtual currency we have virtual machines well before any of those existed we had virtual memory and if the technology that we use every day you'll find it in Windows in OS 10 in Linux in iOS and of course in Android so what is virtual memory and how does it work well let me explain so back in the day of 8-bit computers and today with microcontrollers any app that's running any program that's running on a CPU have access to the entire physical memory and it basically assumed it's the only program running on that CPU and so it's get right to a particular address that's a address 495 that address is actually somewhere in physical RAM and it is address 495 is it right something there that's what goes it right to a different address it goes there and there's a one-to-one relationship between the addressing of the physical RAM and the addresses that the computer program use it now that's fine when you've only got one program running but when you've got two programs running things now become a bit more complicated first of all you have to decide where you're putting each program in memory secondly each program in memory has to be careful not to overwrite the data and the program used by the other task that's running and thirdly all addressing has to be relative that means you can only able to say do something 10 bytes fall from here or 15 bytes back from here you can't use an absolute address like 409 5 because that could actually belong to somebody else it might not be your address it's also the issue of memory fragmentation if you're trying to run two programs and you allocate one bit of the memory for one program and another bit of min with another program and then what happens the first program exits and then you try to write a second one it might fit in that space of the first app but maybe it's a bit smaller so there's a gap left and then when you run a third one it can't fit in that gap it goes somewhere else in memory and then you actually get these a little gap starting to appear as you get this thing called memory fragmentation so and that's a real problem eventually you'll run out of memory just because of fragmentation because you get around these problems we have this technology called virtual memory and in virtual memory each app was running on a mobile phone each program is running on Windows or on OS 10 thinks it's the only app running it thinks it's the lod program running and it has access to all of the address space in fact it doesn't even have to have that amount of physical memory on a 32-bit machine that protis thinks it has 32 bits worth of a memory to play with which is of course 4 gigabytes and the way it works is this when the process when the app wants to access a particular address there is a particular piece of hardware in the CPU called the MMU the memory management unit and what it does is it maps from this virtual address that the app thinks it's running in to an actual physical address somewhere in memory and so now the idea of partitioning up the memory is actually taken over by the operating system and the app doesn't need to worry the apps thinks it's near only the only app running it can write to whatever address is it allowed to whichever memory it's been given to and actually it doesn't care about other addresses from other apps because it's equal its own virtual address space so if we look at this diagram here we can show that we've got app 1 and up to now app one has an address space from 0 through to 5 2 4 2 8 8 0 that's about 5 gig of megabytes of memory and I've also got app 2 with the same width of 5 megabytes of memory and what you actually see is that although it's from 0 to there in the physical memory it might actually start at 5 2 4 2 8 8 0 and it might run for 5 megabytes I mean at the number 2 actually starts at 104 eight five seven six zero and it runs from there for five megabytes and the virtual address zero in both apps is actually mapped to different places in the physical RAM now because there's nothing going on here the app can - absolutely anywhere that the operating system wanted to put them so let's have a look at this diagram so as you can see here app 2 is as it was before it's a five megabytes program from zero to five twenty four to eight a zero and it's been mapped over to an address in the middle layer or physical RAM but app number one have actually been divided into two part and the first half of it is mapped into memory before app number one and the second part of it is mapped into some memories after have one but app 1 and app 2 don't know anything about this they just think they're running in their address space from zero to the end of their program to the advantage of the virtual memory system each app is self-contained it doesn't write over other apps memory space because it had an own virtual address space secondly it doesn't matter where the app is in memory because the MMU does a mapping between those virtual addresses and the physical addresses and certainly the app doesn't need to be in one continuous block in memory can be split up over many many different parts of its the OS will on the MMU that make sure that each address arrives at the right place in physical RAM and therefore you get rid of that memory fragmentation problem now what I've shown you up until now is a one-to-one mapping so that every time you have one particular dress there's a kind of a table that gets looked up by the MMU Lee tells it where to put it in physical RAM but the problem is even for a 300 megabyte program which really isn't that very big you'll need about 79 million entries in such a lookup table to do such mapping and obviously if you then got 10 20 30 40 different programs running on your system that's going to quickly turn into a huge amount of data and there's actually no space left for actual programs because it will just be mapping information so to get around this the main memory the physical memory is divided into different blocks and they called pages and typically they're about 4 K in size and so now using paging actually you'll find that a 300 megabyte app and we need 77,000 entries in a lookup table which at 4 bytes for every entry is about 300k much more manageable so now what happens when an app requests something with a virtual address it actually goes to the MMU in the MMU finds out which pages in and redirects it to the physical address of that particular page however what happens when the address is in the middle of a page at the start of the pages either is a kind of a one-to-one lookup but I am doing it in the middle of the page well actually what happens is that 4k is sold bit so the first 12 bits of the address are copied directly from the virtual address into the physical address then the remaining 20 bits are used as the page look up that 20-bit address is looked up in the page table I think what a page table entry is found and that then gives you the 20 bits for the upper part of the dish and then the combination of the page address and the offset those twelve bits gives you an actual physical address in RAM now one interesting question is where are all these tables held well they're not held in the CPU because even at 300 K or 400 K multiply that by many many many processes running image is not enough space in a CP desserts they have to be held in RAM now that leads us to a kind of interesting conundrum because to act as a virtual address the MMU needs to access physical RAM to find an entry in the table so it can then translate the virtual address into a physical address and then access Ram again please find those multiple ram axis is happening for one ram axis inside of the app and of course that's going to be slow if it's like two ram axes is needed or three-round maximum needed for each virtual address and that's going to slow down your program by up by a factor of three so the way CPU designs get banners if they have a cache a cache of recently looked up addresses casually called the translation lookaside battle the TLB and what that does is whenever there's address translated it gets stuck into this cache and then the next time addresses need actually it looked it up in the TLB but of course remember it only to look up the page size if the program is running through the different instructions inside of one page every time it goes to access it automatically be ATL being hit because that page is already been found just the offset changes which is absolutely okay in some CPUs in fact the TLB is only 20 entries long it might be bigger than that maybe 60 428 but you don't need that many TLB entries to actually increase the performance significantly during this lookup so what happens if the MMU can't find an entry in its table for a particular virtual address when that case the MMU raises a page fault and it goes back to the kernel saying hey I can't find that address now that can happen for one of three reasons first of all the app is actually trying to access an address which is not allowed to access it hasn't been allocated that memory and therefore Linux will just basically kill it off you get a segmentation fault and the program just crashes and just it just gets wiped out of memory because not allowed to access memory that it has be given in the second case it could actually be what they call lazy allocation which means that the current suggest you can have that but it won't actually give it a physical page of RAM until it actually starts to write to it and so in that case a page what happens the kernel is okay I told the app you could use that memory here is where I want you to put it in physical Ram the MMU is reprogrammed and then the whole thing starts off again and the address is found in physical RAM and the third thing that can happen is the emam users we used to have that memory but actually now it's been swapped and therefore the kernel will go and get that page from the compressed RAM so they'd swap that it's actually put it in earlier it will uncompress it will put it somewhere in physical memory it will reprogram the MMU and say okay you can now find that there and then the whole thing carries on and so there we have it virtual memory we've got a whole load of things going on here you've got the virtual addresses you've got physical Ram you've got look-up tables you've got an MMU you've got the translation lookaside buffer you've got page fault and all this is being handled for you by the Linux kernel and by Android so the next time you tap an icon to launch an app just give a thought for all what's going on in the background just as that app can be loaded somewhere into memory and it can runs or you can make that little sprite jump across the screen my name is Gary Simms from Angela thority and I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up there's a link here in the description below which will take you over to the annual policies forums but if you want to speak to me about virtual dressing or virtual memory please go over there and we can have a more detailed discussion than maybe we can have here in the youtube comments below don't forget to subscribe to annual authorities YouTube channel and last but not least I've get to go over to Angela's calm cuz we are your source all things Android

Channel: Android Authority

Views: 199,326

Rating: 4.944881 out of 5

Keywords: AndroidAuthority, Android, Gary Explains, Virtual Memory

Id: 2quKyPnUShQ

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2017