More about operating system interactions

We have seen that, when it comes to I/O, we must keep a close eye on what the operating system is doing under the covers. Let's close this chapter with a discussion about some relevant performance OS concepts that we haven't been able to discuss yet.

Paging, swapping, and the TLB

As we have seen in the Caching Files section, when we discussed caching entire files in memory, there is another leaky abstraction related to memory besides processor level caching that we haven't discussed yet, namely the virtual memory concept that's implemented by the OS.

You probably know that OS provides an illusion of having the entire address space of the computer at its disposal...