UNIX Memory Management - Interview Questions and Answers

Kernel contains 4 data structures for Demand paging. They are,

1. Page table entries,
2. Disk block descriptors,
3. Page frame data table (pfdata),
4. Swap-use table.

Valid, Reference, Modify, Copy on write, Age. These bits are the part of the page table entry, which includes physical address of the page and protection bits.

Kernel in traditional Unix, makes the duplicate copy of the parent's address space and attaches it to the child's process, while swapping. Kernel in System V Unix, manipulates the region tables, page table, and pfdata table entries, by incrementing the reference count of the region table of shared regions.

During the fork() system call the Kernel makes a copy of the parent process's address space and attaches it to the child process.

But the vfork() system call do not makes any copy of the parent's address space, so it is faster than the fork() system call. The child process as a result of the vfork() system call executes exec() system call. The child process from vfork() system call executes in the parent's address space (this can overwrite the parent's data and stack ) which suspends the parent process until the child process exits.

A data representation at the machine level, that has initial values when a program starts and tells about how much space the kernel allocates for the un-initialized data. Kernel initializes it to zero at run-time.

This is the Kernel process that makes rooms for the incoming pages, by swapping the memory pages that are not the part of the working set of a process. Page-Stealer is created by the Kernel at the system initialization and invokes it throughout the lifetime of the system. Kernel locks a region when a process faults on a page in the region, so that page stealer cannot steal the page, which is being faulted in.