language: en

Virtual Memory Architecture in SunOS

Robert A. Gingell Joseph P. Moran William A. Shannon
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2550 Garcia Ave. Mountain View, CA 94043

ABSTRACT A new virtual memory architecture for the Sun implementation of the UNIX operating system is described. Our goals included unifying and simplifying the concepts the system used to manage memory, as well as providing an implementation that fit well with the rest of the system. We discuss an architecture suitable for environments that (potentially) consist of systems of heterogeneous hardware and software architectures. The result is a page-based system in which the fundamental notion is that of mapping process addresses to files.

1. Introduction and Motivation