Книга: Distributed operating systems

7.4. MEMORY MANAGEMENT IN AMOEBA

Amoeba has an extremely simple memory model. A process can have any number of segments it wants to have, and they can be located wherever it wants in the process' virtual address space. Segments are not swapped or paged, so a process must be entirely memory resident to run. Furthermore, although the hardware MMU is used, each segment is stored contiguously in memory.

Although this design is perhaps somewhat unusual these days, it was done for three reasons: performance, simplicity, and economics. Having a process entirely in memory all the time makes RPC go faster. When a large block of data must be sent, the system knows that all of the data are contiguous not only in virtual memory, but also in physical memory. This knowledge saves having to check if all the pages containing the buffer happen to be around at the moment, and eliminates having to wait for them if they are not. Similarly, on input, the buffer is always in memory, so the incoming data can be placed there simply and without page faults. This design has allowed Amoeba to achieve extremely high transfer rates for large RPCs.

The second reason for the design is simplicity. Not having paging or swapping makes the system considerably simpler and makes the kernel smaller and more manageable. However, it is the third reason that makes the first two feasible. Memory is becoming so cheap that within a few years, all Amoeba machines will probably have tens of megabytes of it. Such large memories will substantially reduce the need for paging and swapping, namely, to fit large programs into small machines.

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