A process is divided into Segments. The chunks that a program is divided into which are not necessarily all of the same sizes are called segments. Segmentation gives user’s view of the process which paging does not give. Here the user’s view is mapped to physical memory.
There are types of segmentation:
- Virtual memory segmentation –
Each process is divided into a number of segments, not all of which are resident at any one point in time.
- Simple segmentation –
Each process is divided into a number of segments, all of which are loaded into memory at run time, though not necessarily contiguously.
-
Advantages of Segmentation –
- No Internal fragmentation.
- Segment Table consumes less space in comparison to Page table in paging.
Disadvantage of Segmentation –
- As processes are loaded and removed from the memory, the free memory space is broken into little pieces, causing External fragmentation.
