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  • I believe the note from Wikipedia involves some qualifications on what is used in terms of things being contiguous.
    – JB King
    Commented Sep 17, 2009 at 19:25
  • This question would probably get a better answer on SO.
    – Captain Segfault
    Commented Sep 17, 2009 at 20:00
  • 2
    Don't confuse what virtual memory is with how it's used. Wikipedia's 1st sentence is defining what it is. Your book is talking about how it's typically used. Once people talk about "pages" they're talking about a specific implementation of virtual memory.
    – Tony Lee
    Commented Sep 17, 2009 at 23:30
  • 2
    Your text book is just plain wrong. There are many machines with virtual memory and no secondary storage at all. Similarly, there once were many machines that could use secondary storage as part of main memory but didn't support virtual memory. "Virtual memory" is something that is not memory but is accessed like memory. Your textbook is defining swapping or paging.
    – David Schwartz
    Commented Nov 30, 2011 at 0:10
  • 1
    The textbook defines it entirely incorrectly, secondary storage is not part of the definition. And even Wikipedia's statement about "more than disk space" is misleading, because it may not involve disk at all - that statement sounds like it is "extending memory to disk" plus something else.
    – Kelvin
    Commented May 22, 2012 at 19:46