Question

When memory is divided into several fixed sized partitions, each partition may contain ________.

a) Exactly one process
b) Atleast one process
c) Multiple processes at once
d) None of these

Answer 1

Fixed-sized partitions in memory each contain exactly one process, leading to potential internal fragmentation due to unused space within the partitions. Fixed partitioning is a simple but less flexible memory management technique.

Step-by-step explanation:

When memory is divided into several fixed-sized partitions, each partition may contain exactly one process. This is a strategy used in memory management within operating systems to allocate fixed memory blocks to processes. The fixed partitioning scheme is one of the simplest, where the memory is divided into fixed sizes at system initialization. Each partition holds one process; if a process does not completely use the partition's space, the remaining part is wasted, since multiple processes cannot share a single partition simultaneously. This results in a problem known as internal fragmentation.

Fixed partitioning is less flexible compared to dynamic memory allocation methods like paging or segmentation, which allow for more efficient memory usage by handling memory in a way that can adjust the sizes according to the needs of the processes at a given time.