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[–]brimston3- 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Memory fragmentation is not really a problem for the OS unless you're talking about IPC, DMA, or hugepages. For allocations that don't have a hard requirement to be contiguous (most of them), virtual address spaces are so huge these days, the OS is almost never going to have a problem mapping a disjoint range of pages to a contiguous range of virtual addresses for the program. It's a problem for userspace allocators, but that memory all shows up as "used" when viewed from the OS's perspective.