2509 - Friday 23 January 2009

1 (a) In an operating system, memory management may involve paging and

segmentation.
(i) State three ways in which paging and segmentation are similar

Both are stored in a backing store, Both are part of virtual memory, Both splits
large program into smaller sections

(ii) State one difference between paging and segmentation

The size of pages are of fixed size whereas the size of segments are variable

(b) Explain the term disk threshing.

Disk threshing occurs while moving pages between memory and disk, when
more time is spent on moving pages than on processing, when there is a high
rate of disk access with disks being relatively slow.