24 Nov
2017
24 Nov
'17
8:28 p.m.
Will Senn writes:
I am curious about how the Harvard Architecture
relates to Unix,
historically. If the Harvard Architecture is predicated on the
separation of code from data in order to prevent self-modifying code (my
interpretation), then it would seem to me to be somewhat at odds with a
Unix philosophy of extreme abstraction (code, data, it's all 0's and
1's, after all). In my naive understanding, the PDP-11 itself, with the
Unibus and apparently agnostic ISA seem to summarily reject the Harvard
Architecure...
My question is - was there tension around Harvard and Von Neumann
architectures in Unix circles and if so, how was it resolved?
Thanks,
Will
I don't know how to answer this question directly but in my opinion the
distinction between von Neumann and Harvard architecture machines became
moot with the introduction of memory management units. For all intents
and purposes instructions were separate from data from the PDP 11/70 on.
Jon