In a system with 32-bit virtual addresses and 1 KB page size, use of one-level…
2003
In a system with 32-bit virtual addresses and 1 KB page size, use of one-level page tables for virtual to physical address translation is not practical because of
- A.
the large amount of internal fragmentation
- B.
the large amount of external fragmentation
- C.
the large memory overhead in maintaining page tables
- D.
the large computation overhead in the translation process
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Correct answer: C
The virtual address space is 2^32 bytes. With a 1 KB (2^10) page size, the number of pages is 2^32 / 2^10 = 2^22. A one-level page table requires an entry for each virtual page. Assuming a 4-byte entry size, the total memory required is 2^22 * 4 bytes = 2^24 bytes, which equals 16 MB per process. This excessive memory overhead makes one-level page tables impractical for systems with large virtual address spaces.
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