part4requirrements

Operating Systems Project – Part 4 – Memory Management
In this assignment, you will make your OS Simulator handle the simple Memory Management techniques discussed in
class. We will not attempt to simulate paging.
Here is the premise:
Your Operating System only has 1024 blocks of memory for processes to use. If a process wants to run, it has to see if
there is enough available memory to do so. There are four different methods of allocating memory to a process: First
Fit, Next Fit, Best Fit and Worst Fit. You will be implementing these.
As you run processes, the memory gets broken up into small pieces, which, as discussed in class, can cause problems. If
there isn’t enough memory, you can’t schedule that process until there is enough memory to do so. When this happens,
there are two methods that you can use to help. These are Coalescing and Compaction. You should always try
Coalescing your memory before you try Compacting it. Sometimes these methods work and at other times, there is still
not enough room for your next process. For the basic version of this project, if Coalescing and Compaction do not make
enough room you can assume that your process scheduler will wait until there is enough free memory to allocate the
next process (this should be factored into the Turnaround time calculations for your schedulers). For extra credit, you
can modify your scheduler to choose the next process in the Ready Queue that will fit into the available memory and
bump it to the front of the line. (Note: You should only run Coalescing when you don’t have enough memory for a
process. And you should only run Compaction when Coalescing does not produce enough memory for the process.
Only then should you run your extra credit modification.)
You should also provide an easily understandable way to display the amount of memory taken by each process and how
much available memory there is. Your method of display should clearly demonstrate where there are holes in the
memory between processes (the whole reason we deal with Coalescing and Compaction). When running the Coalescing
and Compaction algorithms, you should clearly display a before and after picture for each operation. It is your choice if
you wish to display these on the screen or if you wish to add them to the files produced by your scheduling methods
from the previous assignment.