Memory management in operating system

The memory management manages the main memory that is important hardware resource in a computer. Application programs and the operating system multiplex the main memory.

The memory manager keeps track of where, in the memory the operating system programs reside, and where the application programs reside. The memory management modules of an operating system are concerned with the management of primary memory. In a multiprogramming system the user part of memory must be further subdivided to accommodate multiple processes.

Main memory is the central focus of the memory management component of the operating system. It is within main memory that instructions reside which are interpreted by the processor. For some embedded applications, the main memory might be only a few kilobytes, whereas for large-scale systems there might be many gigabytes of memory.

Functions of memory management:
*Keeping track if the status of each memory location, whether the memory location is allocated or free. *Determining allocation policy for memory
*Memory allocation technique, memory allocation information must be updated
*Deallocation technique and policy. A process may be release the allocated memory
Memory management in operating system