What is the difference between demand paging and page replacement?
From what I understand, demand paging is basically paging with swapping, so you can swap in a page when it is needed. But page replacement seems like more or less the same thing, where you bring in a page is needed and switching it with an existing page in physical memory.
So is there a distinct difference?
Answer
In a system that uses demand paging, the operating system copies a disk page into physical memory only if an attempt is made to access it and that page is not already in memory (i.e., if a page fault occurs). It follows that a process begins execution with none of its pages in physical memory, and many page faults will occur until most of a process's working set of pages is located in physical memory. This is an example of a lazy loading technique.
From Wikipedia's Demand paging:
Demand paging follows that pages should only be brought into memory if the executing process demands them. This is often referred to as lazy evaluation as only those pages demanded by the process are swapped from secondary storage to main memory. Contrast this to pure swapping, where all memory for a process is swapped from secondary storage to main memory during the process startup.
Whereas, page replacement is simply the technique which is done when there occurs a page-fault. Page replacement is a technique which is utilised for both pure swapping and demand-paging.