Paging and the Address-Translation Problem
Michael A. Bender, Abhishek Bhattacharjee, Alex Conway, Martı́n Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Sudarsun Kannan, William Kuszmaul, Nirjhar Mukherjee, Donald E. Porter, Guido Tagliavini, Janet Vorobyeva, Evan West · 2021
The classical paging problem, introduced by Sleator and Tarjan in 1985, formalizes the problem of caching pages in RAM in order to minimize IOs. Their online formulation ignores the cost of address translation: programs refer to data via virtual addresses, and these must be translated into physical locations in RAM. Although the cost of an individual address translation is much smaller than that of an IO, every memory access involves an address translation, whereas IOs can be infrequent. In practice, one can spend money to avoid paging by over-provisioning RAM; in contrast, address translation is effectively unavoidable. Thus address-translation costs can sometimes dominate paging costs, and systems must simultaneously optimize both.