Memory Management in Solaris

Introduction to solaris History of Solaris Solaris Memory Architecture Memory Management o Swapping o Demand Paging Virtual Memory System

Reference: http://en wi!ipedia org/wi!i/Solaris"#operating"system$

Introduction:
Solaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded
their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is no !no n, has been o ned by Oracle "orporation since Oracle#s ac$uisition o% Sun in &anuary '(1(.)'* Solaris is !no n %or its scalability, especially on S+,-" systems, and %or originating many innovative %eatures such as ./race, 01S and /ime Slider.)3*)2* Solaris supports S+,-"3based and x453based or!stations and servers %rom Oracle and other vendors, ith e%%orts under ay to port to additional plat%orms. Solaris is registered as compliant ith the Single Unix Speci%ication. /he latest stable release is Solaris 11.1

Supported platforms

S+,-", I,33', x45352, +o er+"

6istory7
In 1948, ,/9/ "orporation and Sun announced that they ere collaborating on a pro:ect to merge the most popular Unix variants on the mar!et at that time7 ;S., System <, and =enix. /his became Unix System < -elease 2 >S<-2?.)1(* On September 2, 1991, Sun announced that it ould replace its existing ;S.3derived Unix, SunOS 2, ith one based on S<-2. /his as identi%ied internally as SunOS 5, but a ne mar!eting name as introduced at the same time7 Solaris 2.)11* ,lthough SunOS 2.1.x micro releases ere retroactively named Solaris 1 by Sun, the Solaris name is used almost exclusively to re%er to the S<-23derived SunOS @.( and later.)1'* /he :usti%ication %or this ne AoverbrandA as that it encompassed not only SunOS, but also the OpenBindo s graphical user inter%ace and Open Cet or! "omputing >OC"? %unctionality. /he SunOS minor version is included in the Solaris release number. 1or example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS @.2. ,%ter Solaris '.5, Sun dropped the A'.A %rom the number, so Solaris 8 incorporates SunOS @.8, and the latest release SunOS @.11.1 %orms the core o% Solaris 11.1.

Solaris Memory Architecture:

%he &irtual memory system can 'e considered the core of a Solaris system( and the implementation of Solaris &irtual memory affects )ust a'out e&ery other su'system in the operating system In this chapter( we*ll ta!e a loo! at some of the memory management 'asics and then step into a more detailed analysis of how Solaris implements &irtual memory management Su'se+uent chapters in Part %wo discuss !ernel memory management and that can 'e used to monitor and manage &irtual memory

,hy Ha&e a Virtual Memory SystemA &irtual memory system offers the following 'enefits: . It presents a simple memory programming model to applications so that application de&elopers need not !now how the underlying memory hardware is arranged . It allows processes to see linear ranges of 'ytes in their address space( regardless of the physical layout or fragmentation of the real memory . It gi&es us a programming model with a larger memory si/e than a&aila'le physical storage #e g ( RAM$ and ena'les us to use slower 'ut larger secondary storage #e g ( dis!$ as a 'ac!ing store to hold the pieces of memory that don*t fit in physical memory

0R1M PD0
Memory Management:
%wo 'asic types of memory management manage the allocation and migration of physical pages of memory to and from swap space:

2 swapping 3 demand paging

2 Swapping:
%he swapping algorithm for memory management uses a user process as the granularity for managing memory If there is a shortage of memory( then all of the pages of memory of the least acti&e process are swapped out to the swap de&ice( freeing memory for other processes %his method is easy to implement( 'ut perfor mance suffers 'adly during a memory shortage 'ecause a process cannot resume e4ecution until all of its pages ha&e 'een 'rought 'ac! from secondary storage

3 Demand Paging
%he demand5paged model uses apageas the granularity for memory management Rather than swapping out a whole process( the memory system )ust swaps out small( least used chun!s( allowing processes to continue while an inacti&e part of the process is swapped out