Swapping

• A process can be swapped temporarily out of memory to a backing store, and then brought back into memory for continued execution.
• Backing store – fast disk large enough to accommodate copies of all memory images for all users; must provide direct access to these memory images.
• Roll out, roll in – swapping variant used for priority-based scheduling algorithms; lower-priority process is swapped out so higher-priority process can be loaded and executed.
• Major part of swap time is transfer time; total transfer time is directly proportional to the amount of memory swapped.
• Modified versions of swapping are found on many systems, i.e., UNIX, Linux, and Windows.