Interview Questions - UNIX Memory Management

Kernel contains 4 data structures for Demand paging. They are,

1. Page table entries,
2. Disk block descriptors,
3. Page frame data table (pfdata),
4. Swap-use table.

Valid, Reference, Modify, Copy on write, Age. These bits are the part of the page table entry, which includes physical address of the page and protection bits.

Kernel in traditional Unix, makes the duplicate copy of the parent's address space and attaches it to the child's process, while swapping. Kernel in System V Unix, manipulates the region tables, page table, and pfdata table entries, by incrementing the reference count of the region table of shared regions.

During the fork() system call the Kernel makes a copy of the parent process's address space and attaches it to the child process.

But the vfork() system call do not makes any copy of the parent's address space, so it is faster than the fork() system call. The child process as a result of the vfork() system call executes exec() system call. The child process from vfork() system call executes in the parent's address space (this can overwrite the parent's data and stack ) which suspends the parent process until the child process exits.