Segmentation permits the physical address space of a process to be non contiguous. Paging is another memory-management scheme that offers this advantage. However, paging avoids external fragmentation and the need for compaction, whereas segmentation does not.
It also solves the considerable problem of fitting memory chunks of varying sizes onto the backing store. Most memory-management schemes used before the introduction of paging suffered from this problem.
The problem arises because, when code fragments or data residing in main memory need to be swapped out, space must be found on the backing store. The backing store has the same fragmentation problems discussed in connection with main memory, but access is much slower, so compaction is impossible.
Because of its advantages over earlier methods, paging in its various forms is used in most operating systems, from those for mainframes through those for smartphones. Paging is implemented through cooperation between the operating system and the computer hardware.
Basic Method
The basic method for implementing paging involves breaking physical memory into fixed-sized blocks called frames and breaking logical memory into blocks of the same size called pages. When a process is to be executed, its pages are loaded into any available memory frames from their source (a file system or the backing store). The backing store is divided into fixed-sized blocks that are the same size as the memory frames or clusters of multiple frames.
This rather simple idea has great functionality and wide ramifications. For example, the logical address space is now totally separate from the physical address space, so a process can have a logical 64-bit address space even though the system has less than 264 bytes of physical memory
OBTAINING THE PAGE SIZE ON LINUX SYSTEMS
On a Linux system, the page size varies according to architecture, and there are several ways of obtaining the page size. One approach is to use the getpagesize() system call. Another strategy is to enter the following command on the command line:
getconf PAGESIZE
Each of these techniques returns the page size as a number of bytes