Virtual Memory

operating-systems

Definition

Virtual Memory

Virtual Memory is a memory management technique that provides a process with an “idealized” abstraction of storage resources, creating the illusion of a large, contiguous address space that is decoupled from the physical RAM.

Decoupling

It separates the logical view of memory (contiguous, large) from the physical implementation (potentially fragmented, limited RAM).

Demand Paging

Segments of a process image are loaded from secondary storage (disk) to physical memory only when accessed (on demand). This allows the total virtual memory used by processes to exceed the available physical memory.