paging/segmentation

[slacker]

i have been reading many articles on paging and segmentation but i dont think there are that many advantages to using paging. why do so many people use paging then?

[Ozguxxx]

First thing that I can think of is that paging makes it easier to deal with physical memory in the sense that you have some kind of chunk which you can specify your boundary. If you use segmentation then dealing with physical memory is much harder I mean how can you tell where your boundary is? (I mean boundary that cuts allocated and unallocated memory.) Also swapping can be accomplished by paging, I really do not know much about segmentation, can it also be implemented with segmentation? It can surely be done but then it will be again some kind of paging in the very basic sense, right?So very first impact of paging(I can think of) is that your physical memory manager has to deal with pages instead of single bytes, byte granularity is job of virtual memory manager. However if you come up with some alternative approach using segmentation for memory management that can be used instead of virtual memory then you should absolutely use it... Hope I am clear...