Week 28: CST 334 - Operating Systems

WK04: Weekly Learning Reflection

This week's material covered four major topics in memory management: Free Space Management, Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs), Multi-level Paging, and Swapping. Each of these concepts plays an important role in how operating systems efficiently manage memory, and together they form a larger picture of how virtual memory systems function.

Free Space Management was the most straightforward topic for me. The core ideas- how memory allocators track free blocks, split them, merge them, and choose which space to reuse- felt familiar and intuitive. Concepts like first-fit, best-fit, and worst-fit echo topics from previous programming courses and even some of the work I've done in C.

TLBs also made sense because they resemble other caches in computer architecture. It helps to think of a TLB as a small, specialized 'shortcut' the CPU uses to speed up address translation. Because I already understood how caches work, this topic did not feel overwhelming.

Swapping was also manageable conceptually. The idea of moving inactive pages to disk when memory becomes full seems logical. I understood how swapping prevents the system from running out of RAM, even if it does come with performance costs.

The topic I struggled with the most was Multi-level Paging. The general idea - breaking page tables into multiple layers to reduce memory usage - does make sense at a high level. However, once we got into the details, the formulas, and the many abbreviations (VPN, PFN, offsets, levels, bits per level, etc.), I found myself getting lost. It became difficult to keep track of which part of the virtual address mapped to which table, and doing manual calculations felt overwhelming. Honestly, I realized I probably need to revisit the earlier chapter on paging to rebuild the foundation, but with deadlines I didn't have the time this week. Right now, I'm not even sure what specific questions to ask, because the entire structure of multi-level paging feels tangled in my head.

Despite this, I did have an aha moment when I recognized how TLBs, paging, and swapping all fit together: they're different layers of the same goal - efficient memory use and fast access. I suspect that upcoming material will dig deeper into how hardware and OS cooperate in managing virtual memory, and I hope that will give me a clearer long-term picture. This week definitely showed me which concepts I need to return to later for a deeper understanding.