Memory Management Hardware, and its Support for Operating Systems
Bruce Jacob, Trevor Mudge · 1997
. This survey compares and contrasts the memory management designs of six commercial microarchitectures in the context of today's operating system requirements, which include such features as multiple processes with address space protection, shared memory, large virtual address spaces, and fine-grained protection. Keywords: virtual memory, memory management units, translation lookaside buffers, address spaces, hardware support for operating system functions WORK-IN-PROGRESS March 20, 1997 5:26 pm 2 PART ONE: A Virtual Memory Primer Virtual memory supports the execution of processes only partially resident in memory; this allows operating systems to manage the physical memory effectively. In a virtual memory system, only the most-often used portions of a process's address space actually occupy physical memory; the rest of the address space is stored on disk until needed. Most processors support virtual memory through a hardware memory management unit (MMU) that translates virtual...