Top 10 List of Week 05

1. “top” Explanation

   We can use the top command to view process information. It provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display a list of processes currently being managed by the Linux Kernel. Here, The Linux Man gives a brief explanation of it.

2. More on “top” Command

   Go to the Linux manual page if you still need more information about the top command. It has complete documentation and some things that they call stupid tricks.

3. “ps” Command

   Another way to see process information is with the ps command. It is a static and incomplete version of the top command. It only displays information about a selection of the active processes.

4. More on “ps” Command

   It is the Linux manual page again. Here you can see a lot of options that you can use with the ps command. You can play around with it.

5. What is Virtual Memory?

   Virtual memory allows each process to have its own address space and addresses can be reused in every process, they are no longer unique. However, these addresses need to be somewhere in physical RAM, so virtual memory maps virtual addresses to physical addresses. Find out more on the video!

6. Page Replacement Algorithms

   When using paging for memory management, we need a page replacement algorithm to decide which page needs to be replaced when a new page comes in. Even though there are many page replacement algorithms, the main goal is to reduce page faults. GeeksforGeeks explains it thoroughly in this article.

7. Allocating Kernel Memory

   Buddy system and slab allocation strategies are used to manage free memory that is assigned to kernel processes. The buddy allocation system is an algorithm in which a larger memory block is divided into small parts to satisfy the request. Read more on this article!

8. NUMA - Non Uniform Memory Access

   A computer that contains multiple physical CPUs uses a system called NUMA. In general NUMA architecture, every CPU has a dedicated bus and memory.

9. Techniques To Handle Thrashing

   Thrashing is a condition when the system is spending a major portion of its time servicing the page faults. Because of that, the actual processing done is very negligible. To handle it, we can use the working set model or page fault frequency concept.

10. Frame Allocation Algorithms

    If you have multiple processes, you can use frame allocation algorithms. It helps decide how many frames to allocate to each process. However, we should allocate at least a minimum number of frames to each process.