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prabagaranvt 06-21-2011 05:37 AM

MMU Page Translation
 
Where are the MMU Page Translation Tables stored?
either in Main Memory(RAM) or part of the MMU Hardware?

paulsm4 06-22-2011 07:29 PM

Q: Is this a test question/homework assignment ;)?

Q: What do you think the MMU would do with them if it could somehow "store them in hardware"?

Look here for more details:

http://tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit

prabagaranvt 06-23-2011 12:15 AM

This is not a test qn/assignment. I wanted to know the internals of memory management.

For each Translation , CPU needs to lookup the translation table in memory which is a slow device compared to CPU.
So , if it could be stored in hardware then the translation will be speeded up.

Correct me if i am wrong.

paulsm4 06-23-2011 10:02 AM

OK, fair enough :)

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_unit

The MMU normally translates virtual page numbers to physical page numbers via an associative cache called a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). When the TLB lacks a translation, a slower mechanism involving hardware-specific data structures or software assistance is used. The data found in such data structures are typically called page table entries (PTEs), and the data structure itself is typically called a page table.
More details can also be found here:
http://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/htm...rstand006.html

So yes, everything the kernel does ultimately uses memory. The page tables themselves are created and maintained in kernel memory.

And yes, the kernel is optimized to make use of hardware resources (such as the TLB) to as great an extent as possible.

abdo_elrahman 01-14-2013 10:28 AM

I know this would look a bit old post, But I do really have a related question here:
Is there anyway in Linux or any other similar OSes to control the TLB or play around with it, I really want to although I do know this is something nowadays totally is done by the MMU unit which is a hardware setting, but we have a new comers of multi/many core OSes and I have no idea how they handle that in the future, so you guys have any idea how to play with the TLBs in linux ?

mina86 01-15-2013 03:42 AM

Interaction with TLB is handled by the kernel and it's limited to flushing invalid TLB entries, which may be necessary when some mapping is changed or context switch happens. Flushing is of course not a desired operation as the mapping has to be re-read from memory which slows things down. There's not much else one can do with TLB as it operates mostly by itself.

sundialsvcs 01-16-2013 02:48 PM

Everything that is "low-level guts related to" memory management will always be found in the /arch/whatever directory, since such things are by-definition "architecture specific." Things like, "what the actual bits mean, how the data-structures are to be arranged for this-or-that CPU, how the control-registers have to be stuffed," and so on, will be found (only...) here. Everything above this will be more-or-less an abstraction.


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