GATE CSE 2001 | Question: 1.20

Question

Where does the swap space reside?

• A. RAM
• B. Disk
• C. ROM
• D. On-chip cache

Comments

As per Galvin,

swap space resides in DISK

direct question from GALVIN

Answer 1

Option (B) is correct.

Swap space is the area on a hard disk which is part of the Virtual Memory of your machine, which is a combination of accessible physical memory (RAM) and the swap space. Swap space temporarily holds memory pages that are inactive. Swap space is used when your system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and there is insufficient unused physical memory available. If the system happens to need more memory resources or space, inactive pages in physical memory are then moved to the swap space therefore freeing up that physical memory for other uses. Note that the access time for swap is slower therefore do not consider it to be a complete replacement for the physical memory. Swap space can be a dedicated swap partition (recommended), a swap file, or a combination of swap partitions and swap files.

Comments

if entire page is swapped, that is done by swapper, but if only one-one page swapped (like FIFO, LRU) that is done by pager

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What is the difference between entire page or  one-one page?

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is backing store same as swap space ?

Answer 2

ans is B.

generally swap space is 2*RAM, not compulsorily always but generally. inactive pages of memory are moved to swap memory.

Answer 3

Swap space is an area on disk that temporarily holds a process memory image. When physical memory demand is sufficiently low, process memory images are brought back into physical memory from the swap area. Having sufficient swap space enables the system to keep some physical memory free at all times.
Therefore B.