4 Aug
2008
4 Aug
'08
3:25 p.m.
And, in case you're worried that hardware had to
be adjusted depending
on what address bus used, it didn't. The CPU asserts a I/O page line
on the bus whenever there's an access to the I/O page of address space,
So, the device only needs to check 12 address lines (memory accesses
are 16 bites wide) and the I/O page line, regardless of how wide the
address bus on the CPU is.
Actually, that's only yhe case on the Q-bus, which could have either 18
or 22 address lines (was there ever a version that only drove 16 address
lines?)
On the Unibus, there are always 18 address lines, and devices check all 18
of them. On machines without an MMU, or with the MMU turned off, the top 2
address lines (A16 and A17) are asserted if all of A13...A15 are 1's.
AFAIK, that was the case from the very first PDP11, which is the whole
point of this discussion, the machine was designed with the future in
mind Unibus machines with 22 bit addressing have a special memory bus
(not UNibus) with 22 address lines, and a second, simple, MMU, called the
Unibus Map, between the 18 Unibus address lines and the 22 memory address
lines for DMA.
-tony