Memory Management Comparison Essay

When discussing the differences in holding management practices between Windows and Linux environments, an understanding of what they do is necessary. Memory management systems are middle aspects of operating systems. Managing a memory hierarchy of random access memory (RAM) and available hard disks is only its basic function. They perform other critical tasks such as the allocation and de-allocation of memory for processes that take care of logistics and implementing virtual memory via the hard disk to perform as additional RAM.Maximum optimization of the memory system is crucial as it greatly affects the overall speed and performance of the system. An important concept in memory management is virtual memory. The basic appraisal behind this is providing an application the illusion of the presence of large amounts of memory available for use. This is made possible as the kernel makes use of secondary storage (hard disk) to execute extra memory requirements. Virtual memory requir es mapping functions to do address translation converting somatogenetic addresses to virtual addresses.The virtual being the location the application refers to, and the physical being the actual memory location this is generally a paging or segmentation function, but can be both, depending on the kernel, processor computer architecture and its state. To begin a comprehensive comparison of memory management systems of Windows and Linux, let us first analyze the data mental synthesiss used to keep track of and prolong virtual memory. Windows uses a tree form system where each node of the tree is called Virtual Address Descriptors (VAD). VADs denote a range of address that has the alike commit state information and protection parameters.This tree is a balanced to keep the depth of the tree at a minimum. This allows the search time when determination a node containing a location to be kept relatively low. Nodes can be marked one of three ways, committed, free, or reserved. Committ ed nodes construe ones that have had code or data mapped to it. Free nodes are not yet used reserved nodes are used in special cases. In Linux systems, virtual memory is kept in a linked list structure. This list is a structure that represents continuous areas of memory having the identical protection parameters.The structure records the address range it is mapped onto, whether it is pinned in memory, the direction it will grow in, and the protection mode. Whether the area the public or private is similarly recorded. This linked list also converts into a tree list if the number of entries exceeds a particular number. This method uses the best structure in the best situations. These two systems while originating in contrastive backgrounds (Windows commercial setting, Linux hacker setting), have modern and theoretically sound concepts which are suitable for production environments.Both systems have many things in common with hardly a(prenominal) technical differences. Windows has gone through more thought and effort during its design/development with decisions at various levels being made to better performance. While in the case of Linux, these decisions were often favoring simplicity instead of performance. This caused Windows to be developed into complex and sophisticated code whereas Linux is elegant and simple while still being modern.