22 Dec
2022
22 Dec
'22
11:33 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 12:27 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I think you left off a critical word: "fragmentation." I interpreted this to
be
about external memory fragmentation a la memory allocators. As in,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(computing)#External_fragmentat…
Presumably, this would be less of an issue if they were actually making use
of the virtual memory hardware to compose contiguous virtual address spaces
from discontiguous physical memory pages.
- Dan C.
From: Bakul Shah
There is a further para:
Reducing external memory fragmentation to zero
by utilizing the VAX-
11/780 memory mapping hardware for scatter loading is high on the list
of things to do in the second implementation pass.
I'm curious as to exactly what is meant by "external memory"? They must
mean
memory on the Synchronous Backplane Interconnect:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Synchronous_Backplane_Interconnect
I.e. what most of us would call 'main memory'.
[snip]