there's an interesting parallel discussion going on over at riscv about page size. 4k won the day. 

fairly shocking in a world of 4 TiB systems but ...

ron

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 2:21 PM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:

> On 2018, Apr 25, at 4:45 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>>> Our comment was that ???It ain???t VIRTUAL memory if it isn???t all there??? as
>>> opposed to virtual addressing.
>>
>> Gene Amdahl was not a fan of paging.  He said that virtual memory
>> merely magnifies the need for real memory.
>
> Wasn't that a Seymour Cray quote?  Seems like he was also not a fan of VM.

My favorite is due to Dave Clark at MIT: “Anytime someone says ‘virtual’ you should think ‘slow’”

followed closely by “Any problem in computer science can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction” and “Any performance problem can be solved by removing a layer of abstraction.”

As one converted to the HPC cults, I am naturally opposed to small pages, virtual anything, and interrupts…

-L