Pages / paging

Memory paging is a memory management technique that divides both virtual and phyisical memory address space into fixed size units called pages.

It is the OS responsibility to manage these pages and map virtual pages to physical frames, via a page table for each process. This isolation between processes avoids races for address spaces.

Paging is enabled in most (if not all) modern operating systems. Among the many features it provides, a known historical one is called swapping, which consists of moving full processes between physical memory and disk to free up RAM.

Fun fact: It is an analogy to the pages of a book, where the smallest unit that can be indexed is a page.