Memory management is the process by which an operating system manages and allocates primary memory. It tracks both allocated and free memory locations. Key techniques include single contiguous allocation, partitioned allocation, paged memory management, and segmented memory management. Swapping moves processes temporarily from memory to disk to improve performance. Memory allocation assigns space to processes, and fragmentation occurs when free spaces are too small to use. Paging and segmentation retrieve processes from disk to memory. Dynamic loading and linking load libraries only when needed at runtime rather than during compilation.