14 Jul
2015
14 Jul
'15
6:13 p.m.
From: Johnny Billquist
While the pages are variable in length, each page
starts at an 8K
virtual address boundary.
Which is another difference between PDP-11 'pages', and real pages as used on
every other machine of the period which had virtual memory: normally, page
sizes were small, ranging from 512 bytes to 1K words. No other machine was
even _close_ to 8KB.
In other machines, the page was the fundamental unit of memory allocation; on
PDP-11's, that unit is the click (0100 bytes).
If you only had one page, and that page covered the
full virtual
address space, then I would agree that it was a segment model.
That's only true in the brain-damaged x86 model, in which 'segments' were
added as a kludge to expand the address space.
If you study _real_ segmented architecture machines, like the GE645, NS32K,
etc you will discover that in them, a segment is a fixed-size chunk of the
total (much larger) address space, and they start at fixed offsets in that
space. A segment which is less than full-sized leaves a gap in the address
space before the (fixed) start of the next segment.
All of which sounds just like the 'pages' in the PDP-11...
Noel