Top 10 List of Week 05

1. Memory Hierarchy Design
   This page explains about the memory hierarchy design with an illustration, which is a pyramid. From this page I also learned that the hierarchy is divided into two: external memory and primary memory. I like this page because, first, it’s your classic GFG, and it also explains the characteristics simply.

2. Page Replacement Algorithms
   FIFO popped out on one of W05’s quiz and it shook me HARD because I understand nothing at all. I GSGSed and found this page and finally understood how FIFO works, so this page really helped me. Can’t say I could do the quiz though, I defo failed it.

3. Virtual Memory
   This page said that virtual memory is a technique where secondary memory can be used as if it’s a part of the main memory. It uses both hardware and software to work, where data from a program is stored in a physical address using RAM. I quite like this page because it has a video to explain it, and also text if I need to read quick.

4. Techniques to Handle Thrashing
   I don’t really like the name of this thing, but apparently it’s important if I want to learn more about virtual memory. Thrashing is a condition or a situation when the system is spending a major portion of its time in servicing the page faults, but the actual processing done is very negligible.

5. Copy on Write
   Copy on Write or simply COW is a resource management technique. One of its main use is in the implementation of the fork system call in which it shares the virtual memory(pages) of the OS.

6. top vs Htop vs Glances
   top is task manager but really complicated for some reason. Htop is like top, but more colorful and easy to the eyes. Definitely prefer this one because yes. Glances is like top, but in Python. It’s a Python-based sysytems telemetry monitor, this page says. Whatever this page told me, I’d rather just press ctrl + shift + escape.

7. Buddy System Algorithm
   Buddy system? Is this some kind of counseling session? Haha apparently not. Apparently this is an interesting algorithm with an equally interesting name. Buddy system is an algorithm where all free page frames are grouped into 10 lists of blocks that contain groups of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and 512 contiguous page frames, respectively.

8. Swapping in Operating System
   Swapping is a memory management scheme in which any process can be temporarily swapped from main memory to secondary memory so that the main memory can be made available for other processes.

9. FIFO Page Replacement Work
   FIFO is like stack, a friend told me while reading this page together. I honestly couldn’t understand what he was saying but whatever.

10. NUMA
    NUMA (non-uniform memory access) is a method of configuring a cluster of microprocessor in a multiprocessing system so that they can share memory locally, improving performance and the ability of the system to be expanded. NUMA is used in a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system.