A Flexible External Paging Interface
Yousef A. Khalidi and Michael N. Nelson
Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Inc.
Mountain View, California
Abstract
In this paper we describe an aspect of the Spring virtual memory
system that was influenced by the distributed object-oriented
architecture of Spring. The virtual memory system supports external
pagers like those provided in MACH, yet the architecture is more
flexible and provides better caching opportunities than is possible in
other systems. A novel aspect of the architecture is the separation of
the memory abstraction from the interface that provides the paging
operations. This separation provides considerable caching
opportunities in our file system and it facilitates our extensible
stackable file system architecture. The virtual memory architecture
described in this paper is implemented and has been in use for over
three years as part of the experimental Spring operating system.
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