- The major goal of a virtual memory (VM) system is transparency.
This usage of transparency is sometimes confusing; some students think that “being transparent” means keeping everything out in the open, i.e., what government should be like. Here, it means the opposite: that the illusion provided by the OS should not be visible to ap- plications. Thus, in common usage, a transparent system is one that is hard to notice, not one that responds to requests as stipulated by the Freedom of Information Act.