What is the difference between a 'page' or memory and a 'frame' of memory?
WP has a adequate discussion of paging, which I think I understand.. However I am confused by the articles repeated use of the term Page Frame.
I thought frames and pages were different things. Could someone please clarify the difference.
Asked By : jsj
Best Answer from StackOverflow
Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/11667
Answered By : Pseudonym
Short version: "page" means "virtual page" (i.e. a chunk of virtual address space) and "page frame" means "physical page" (i.e. a chunk of physical memory).
That's it, pretty much. It's important to keep the two concepts distinct because at any given time, a page may not be backed by a page frame (it could be a zero-fill page which hasn't been accessed, or paged out to secondary memory), and a page frame may back multiple pages (sometimes in different address spaces, e.g. shared memory or memory-mapped files).
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