GATE CS 2005 Q21 — I/O Scheduling

Swap space is a dedicated area on the secondary storage (disk) used by the operating system as an extension of physical memory (RAM) to implement virtual memory.

• When the physical RAM becomes full, the operating system moves inactive pages of running processes from RAM to the swap space to free up memory for active processes.
• This swapped-out data consists of actual process data (such as the process's heap, stack, or data segments).

Let's evaluate the options:

• Option A: Temporary HTML pages are managed by web browsers and stored in the standard file system cache, not in the swap space.
• Option B: Swap space is specifically designed to temporarily hold process data/pages when RAM is insufficient. This is correct.
• Option C: The super-block contains file system metadata and is stored in the file system partition, not the swap space.
• Option D: Device drivers are executable code loaded into the kernel memory space during system boot or on-demand, not stored in the swap space.