Jaron Lanier is a scientist, musician, and writer best known for his work in virtual reality and his advocacy of humanism and sustainable economics in a digital context. His 1980s start-up VPL Research created the first commercial VR products and introduced avatars, multi-person virtual world experiences, and prototypes of major VR applications such as surgical simulat. Sheepshaver only runs 9.0.4 therefor Mac OS 9.2.1 will not work. Because sheepshaver can only emulate a Macintosh 9600. Not a Power Mac G4 or G3 iMac or even a G3 Powermac Share.
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Related to virtual memory: cache memory
virtual memory
[′vər·chə·wəl ′mem·rē] (computer science)A combination of primary and secondary memories that can be treated as a single memory by programmers because the computer itself translates a program or virtual address to the actual hardware address.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
virtual memory
(memory management)A system allowing a computer program to behave as though the computer's memory was larger than the actual physicalRAM. The excess is stored on hard disk and copied to RAM as required.
Virtual memory is usually much larger than physical memory, making it possible to run programs for which the total code plus data size is greater than the amount of RAM available. This is known as 'demand paged virtual memory'. A page is copied from disk to RAM ('paged in') when an attempt is made to access it and it is not already present. This paging is performed automatically by collaboration between the CPU, the memory management unit (MMU), and the operating systemkernel. The program is unaware of virtual memory, it just sees a large address space, only part of which corresponds to physical memory at any instant.
The virtual address space is divided into pages. Each virtual address output by the CPU is split into a (virtual) page number (the most significant bits) and an offset within the page (the N least significant bits). Each page thus contains 2^N bytes (or whatever the unit of addressing is). The offset is left unchanged and the memory management unit (MMU) maps the virtual page number to a physical page number. This is recombined with the offset to give a physical address - a location in physical memory (RAM).
The performance of a program will depend dramatically on how its memory access pattern interacts with the paging scheme. If accesses exhibit a lot of locality of reference, i.e. each access tends to be close to previous accesses, the performance will be better than if accesses are randomly distributed over the program's address space thus requiring more paging.
In a multitasking system, physical memory may contain pages belonging to several programs. Without demand paging, an OS would need to allocate physical memory for the whole of every active program and its data. Such a system might still use an MMU so that each program could be located at the same virtual address and not require run-time relocation. Thus virtual addressing does not necessarily imply the existence of virtual memory. Similarly, a multitasking system might load the whole program and its data into physical memory when it is to be executed and copy it all out to disk when its timeslice expired. Such 'swapping' does not imply virtual memory and is less efficient than paging.
Some application programs implement virtual memory wholly in software, by translating every virtual memory access into a file access, but efficient virtual memory requires hardware and operating system support.
Virtual memory is usually much larger than physical memory, making it possible to run programs for which the total code plus data size is greater than the amount of RAM available. This is known as 'demand paged virtual memory'. A page is copied from disk to RAM ('paged in') when an attempt is made to access it and it is not already present. This paging is performed automatically by collaboration between the CPU, the memory management unit (MMU), and the operating systemkernel. The program is unaware of virtual memory, it just sees a large address space, only part of which corresponds to physical memory at any instant.
The virtual address space is divided into pages. Each virtual address output by the CPU is split into a (virtual) page number (the most significant bits) and an offset within the page (the N least significant bits). Each page thus contains 2^N bytes (or whatever the unit of addressing is). The offset is left unchanged and the memory management unit (MMU) maps the virtual page number to a physical page number. This is recombined with the offset to give a physical address - a location in physical memory (RAM).
The performance of a program will depend dramatically on how its memory access pattern interacts with the paging scheme. If accesses exhibit a lot of locality of reference, i.e. each access tends to be close to previous accesses, the performance will be better than if accesses are randomly distributed over the program's address space thus requiring more paging.
In a multitasking system, physical memory may contain pages belonging to several programs. Without demand paging, an OS would need to allocate physical memory for the whole of every active program and its data. Such a system might still use an MMU so that each program could be located at the same virtual address and not require run-time relocation. Thus virtual addressing does not necessarily imply the existence of virtual memory. Similarly, a multitasking system might load the whole program and its data into physical memory when it is to be executed and copy it all out to disk when its timeslice expired. Such 'swapping' does not imply virtual memory and is less efficient than paging.
Some application programs implement virtual memory wholly in software, by translating every virtual memory access into a file access, but efficient virtual memory requires hardware and operating system support.
This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)
virtual memory
Simulating more random access memory (RAM) than actually exists, allowing the computer to run larger programs and multiple programs concurrently. A common function in most every OS and hardware platform, virtual memory uses storage (hard drive or SSD) to temporarily hold what was in RAM.Virtual memory allows multiple programs to load in RAM at the same time. Each application addresses RAM starting at zero, but virtual memory takes control of the RAM addressing and lets each application function as if it had unlimited RAM.
Note that virtual 'memory' and virtual 'machine' are not the same. Virtual memory is used all the time, whereas a virtual machine is an optional approach for running applications and pertains mostly to servers (see virtual machine).
Virtual Memory Pages
The computer's real memory (RAM) is broken up into smaller segments, called 'pages,' typically 4KB in size. When RAM fills up, pages not currently in use by open applications are written to storage in a virtual memory 'swap file.' When any swapped out page in storage is required again, once again a page in RAM is written to storage to make room, and the required page in storage is retrieved.
RAM is the computer's workspace, and since there is often several hundred times more storage space than RAM space, virtual memory dramatically increases the computer's capacity to do work. However, there is a penalty. When a user has too many open programs, there can be excessive amounts of page swapping, causing applications to slow down. In addition, switching between applications is no longer instantaneous (see thrashing).
Hardware Is Required
Virtual memory can be implemented in software only, but efficient operation requires specialized hardware circuits. All modern, general-purpose CPUs have memory management units (MMUs) that support virtual memory. They provide 'page tables' that are used to translate between the program's 'virtual' addresses and the 'real' addresses in RAM and storage, which may change at any time. Although a program may initially load as a contiguous block of code, it can wind up in pages randomly scattered around RAM.Virtual memory claims are sometimes made for specific applications that bring additional parts of the program in as needed; however, true virtual memory is built into the operating system and hardware and works with all applications. See Windows swap file.
English 9mr. Mac's Virtual Existence Software
| Memory Is Extended to Storage |
|---|
| Virtual memory allows more programs to be opened simultaneously by using the hard drive or solid state drive (SSD) as temporary storage of RAM pages. |
English 9mr. Mac's Virtual Existence Key
| Page Out, Page In |
|---|
| When RAM (real memory) is full and the current program needs instructions that are not in RAM, pages are swapped. In this example, program A needs a page from the disk, and a page from program C is swapped out to make room. |
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