Single shared memory space architecture for less power
M. Bos, Paul Havinga, Gerardus Johannes Maria Smit · University of Twente Research Information · 1999
Virtual Memory and Hardware Memory Protection are so common now that they are even used in handheld devices that do not include any secondary storage to swap to. As most handhelds depend on batteries for their power supply, it seems worth investigating an architecture without these expensive pieces of hardware. New type safe languages may allow dropping the memory protection hardware as well. This paper describes the first investigations done in this direction. Both benefits and drawbacks are described and ways to minimize the drawbacks are investigated. Keywords--- Memory Management Unit, lowpower, Single Memory Space. I. Introduction D UE to historical reasons, most current microprocessors include a Memory Management Unit to support virtual memory, memory protection, paging, segmentation, and the like. According to Silberschatz and Galvin [1], all memory-management strategies have the same goal: to keep many processes in memory simultaneously to allow multiprogramming. Memory Man...