A Taxonomy of Shared Address Space Systems
Banu Özden, Avi Silberschatz · 1992
The availability of 64-bit processors enables operating systems the use of the shared address space (SAS) paradigm where all processes execute in the same address space. This is in contrast to most existing operating systems that use the private address space (PAS) paradigm where each process views the entire space as dedicated to itself. The PAS paradigm yields high overhead for interprocess communication and sharing, whereas the SAS paradigm can reduce the cost of communication and provide simple abstractions to the application level to build variety of communication schemes. Furthermore, the use of the SAS paradigm results in increased system performance. The SAS paradigm can be classified into various models, which differ in the way the address space and protection domain are managed. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of the SAS models and discuss the tradeoffs between these models.