What Am I? (Operating System)

Here’s an ‘Operating System’ edition of ‘What Am I?’

1. Question 1:

   • I’m kind of a place where memory throws its currently unused pages and takes the pages it needs.

   • I act as a bridge between memory and disk, though I’m bypassed by a few.

   • I help make the memory space look larger than it actually is.

   • With memory compression techniques in modern operating systems, I’m being used less than before.

2. Question 2:

   • I occur when a requested page is not found in physical memory.
   • When I happen, the OS runs a handler to resolve me.
   • The handler fetches the missing page from disk, loads it into memory, updates the page table to mark it as present, and sets the Page Frame Number (PFN) in the Page Table Entry (PTE) with its new in-memory address.

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