Suppose memory for the address space process image is alloca

Suppose memory for the address space (process image) is allocated as segments using segmentation. What extra hardware is needed to generate a physical address and why?

Solution

For generating a physical address a Memory Management Unit(MMU) is required which is a computer hardware device. The segmentation is done to overcome the porblem of memory shortage to store and execute the huge programs in the physical memory. The segmentation is basically a virtual memory which will be generated by CPU, the process of loading only the required content at any moment of time. Actually the whole big piece of code resides in secondary memory and required code will be in the main memory. Whenever there is requirement of other piece of code mapping is done between main memory and the secondary memory which is called as swapping which is the functionality of MMU.