Re: Memory Management - BSD vs Linux

Darin Johnson (darin@connectnet.com)
Wed, 13 Aug 1997 10:52:01 -0700 (PDT)


> 603 has no
> TLB reload hardware (though it has hardware assist to decode the data it
> fetches on behalf of a TLB miss). This was done to simplify the design
> and reduce the amount of silicon real estate.

Ah, this makes more sense now. I assumed TLB's were always
automatically managed, and didn't realize some chips might not
do this.

However, a TLB miss is usually fixed up with just a few memory
references (if the page tables are in memory). This shouldn't
require complicated routines or esoteric data structures; why
not just directly check the Linux page tables and load the TLB
from there, and ignore the hash/inverted-page-table? I'll admit,
I'm PPC-challenged.