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I'm studying for my operating systems final, and one question that my professor asked that I can't seem to find the answer to is the following:

"Why does virtual memory use non-contiguous memory allocation?"

The textbook only talks about virtual memory in the context of non-contiguous memory allocation, but never explains why. The only reason I can think of is because of page replacement, but I'm not even sure that's right. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

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Your professor asked you a tricky question. The answer is - by definition.

The virtual memory is a mechanism to map non-contiguous physical memory to contiguous logical memory (for each running process). Why does the free physical memory become non-contiguous? Well, processes start and stop in unpredictable order, so the memory of stopped processes ought to be reused.

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