What memory management scheme involves storing and retrieving data from secondary storage for use in main memory?

The memory management scheme that involves storing and retrieving data from secondary storage for use in main memory is known as paging. This technique is part of the virtual memory system, where the operating system manages different pages of data that can be loaded into RAM as needed. When a program requires more memory than is physically available, the system swaps portions of data, known as pages, between the main memory and secondary storage (like a hard disk or SSD). This allows for efficient utilization of memory, enabling larger applications to run on a machine with limited RAM.

In paging, the memory is divided into fixed-size units called pages, and the secondary storage is divided into corresponding page frames. The page table keeps track of where each page is stored in memory. This helps in reducing fragmentation and efficiently using available memory resources. As a result, when a program accesses data not currently in main memory, a page fault occurs, which triggers the operating system to retrieve the required data from secondary storage, loading it into RAM for processing.

Other choices do not reflect this specific interaction with secondary storage in the same manner. Caching involves keeping frequently accessed data in a faster storage layer to speed up access times, while fragmentation refers to the inefficient use of storage resulting from allocation and deallocation patterns