Problem:

Compare virtual memory and segmentation techniques, discuss how memory management schemes might effect programming paradigms.

Limit your answer to 100 words, you may use additional graph illustrations.

Solution:

In the techniques of segmentation, the entire address space is divided into a pre-defined number of segments that are essentially called the data segment, code segment, stack segment etc. All these segments can be read from and written unto. When mapping to logical address space, an offset is applied to the segment to derive its logical address.

On the other hand, in the technique of memory paging, the memory is divided into sequence of fixed sized chunks called pages. The logical address is derived by applying an offset to the page number.

Each of these technique have implications on programming paradigms as segments are used where greater security is required because they are pre-defined and they can avoid spurious read/write operations when translation of addresses is done. Otherwise, paging reduces fragmentation and thus offers better memory management. Most of the modern OS combine both these techniques for optimal memory management.