What is virtual memory?

A virtual memory is hardware technique where the system appears to have more memory that it actually does. This is done by time-sharing, the physical memory and storage parts of the memory one disk when they are not actively being used.
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Anand Mohan

  • Jun 30th, 2005
 

Make the answer more technically sound.

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Sunil

  • Jul 28th, 2006
 

Virtual Memory is space on harddisk where processes which are not frequently used in RAM are being transfered so as to increase the speed.If the required process is in virtual memory it will be swapped to main memory and executed.As Large is virtual memory so fast the system will be.

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Srimanth

  • Aug 29th, 2006
 

A program instruction on an Intel 386 or later CPU can address up to 4GB of memory, using its full 32 bits. This is normally far more than the RAM of the machine. (The 32nd exponent of 2 is exactly 4,294,967,296, or 4 GB. 32 binary digits allow the representation of 4,294,967,296 numbers ? counting 0.) So the hardware provides for programs to operate in terms of as much as they wish of this full 4GB space as Virtual Memory, those parts of the program and data which are currently active being loaded into Physical Random Access Memory (RAM). The processor itself then translates (?maps?) the virtual addresses from an instruction into the correct physical equivalents, doing this on the fly as the instruction is executed. The processor manages the mapping in terms of pages of 4 Kilobytes each - a size that has implications for managing virtual memory by the system.

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goksn

  • Sep 6th, 2009
 

Virtual memory is a memory management technique used for handling programs/data files larger than the physical memory of the system.

Op.system loads as much data as possible into its main memory (RAM). when it has to load the remaining data (it may be part of binary program or data file) , op.system exchanges RAM space (which is not in use at present) with Hard Disk Space and loads the remaining data into RAM.

Usually swap memory (a separate memory partition) is used for this virtual memory implementation.

mohd_ismail21

  • Mar 16th, 2010
 

Virtual memory is a non physical (intangible) memory created by the CPU to temporarily store the data for displaying purpose. Example: the website page you are seeing is not stored in physical memory it is stored in virtual memory and when you close the website page the memory is lost.


Regards
Ismail

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