Virtual Memory

Definitions

1. An OS memory management technique that gives each process the illusion of a large, contiguous address space by using page tables to map virtual addresses to physical RAM frames or disk-backed swap. It enables isolation between processes, demand paging, and the ability to use more memory than is physically installed.

   In plain English: A system that lets programs use more memory than the computer physically has, by transparently shuffling data between RAM and disk as needed.

   Example: "The server has 16 GB of RAM but the process allocated 40 GB of virtual memory — most of those pages are never touched so they're never backed by physical frames."

Related Terms

• IPC
• Kernel Space
• Malloc
• Memory Segment
• Memory Zeroing
• Paging
• Stack Memory
• Virtual Address Space