GATE CS 1995 Q2.16 — Memory Management and Virtual Memory

In a virtual memory system, we distinguish between the virtual address space (specified by the CPU address lines) and the physical address space (the actual main memory/RAM size).

1. Virtual Address Space vs. Physical Memory: The primary purpose of virtual memory is to allow the execution of programs that are larger than the physical memory. Hence, the virtual address space specified by the CPU must be larger than the physical memory size.
2. Virtual Address Space vs. Secondary Storage: All virtual pages of a process must be stored on the secondary storage (such as disk swap space) when they are not present in the physical memory. Therefore, the virtual address space must be smaller than (or at most equal to) the secondary storage size to ensure there is enough disk space to back up all virtual pages.

Thus, the blanks are filled with larger and smaller respectively, which corresponds to Option C.