Thursday, October 9, 2008

Logical Vs Physical Address space



An address generated by the CPU is commonly refereed as Logical Address,whereas the address seen by the memory unit,that is one loaded into the memory address register of the memory is commonly refereed as the Physical Address.The compile time and load time address binding generates the identical logical and physical addresses.However, the execution time address binding scheme results in differing logical and physical addresses.

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The set of all logical addresses generated by a program is known as Logical Address Space,whereas the set of all physical addresses corresponding to these logical addresses is Physical Address Space.Now, the run time mapping from virtual address to physical address is done by a hardware device known as Memory Management Unit.Here in the case of mapping the base register is known as relocation register.The value in the relocation register is added to the address generated by a user process at the time it is sent to memory.Let's understand this situation with the help of example:If the base register contains the value 1000,then an attempt by the user to address location 0 is dynamically relocated to location 1000,an access to location 346 is mapped to location 1346.

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The user program never sees the real physical address space,it always deals with the Logical addresses.As we have two different type of addresses Logical address in the range (0 to max) and Physical addresses in the range(R to R+max) where R is the value of relocation register.The user generates only logical addresses and thinks that the process runs in location to 0 to max.As it is clear from the above text that user program supplies only logical addresses,these logical addresses must be mapped to physical address before they are used.

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2 comments:

chandrika said...

if logical address space of 8 pages= 1024 words each,mapped on to a physical memory of 32 frames
a) how many bits are there in logical and physical address

Unknown said...

13 bits in LA
15 bits in PA
in BT they have given a wrong answer