Pages and Paging

Recall that external fragmentation is the issue of memory having holes (available memory sections) that are too small to fit in new programs.

An approach to this issue is called paging, in which the logical address space of a program is divided into equally-sized chunks called pages. Physical memory (main memory) is also divided into chunks of that same size called frames, and we map (copy) pages into frames.

Any page (from any running program) can be placed into any available frame, which means that a program can exists in memory at several, non-contiguous places.

Paging is the predominant memory management technique used today.