[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-04-25 23:14, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4/25/18, Ronald Natalie 
> <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>> The fun argument is what is Virtual Memory.    Typically, people align that
>> with paging but you can stretch the definition to cover paging.
>> This was a point of contention in the early VAX Unix days as the ATT (System
>> III, even V?) didn’t support paging on the VAX where as BSD did.
> In my book, virtual memory is any addressing scheme where the
> addresses that the program uses are different from the physical memory
> addresses.  Nowadays most OSes use a scheme where each process has its
> own virtual address space, and virtual memory is demand-paged from
> backing store on disk.  But there have been other schemes.

Yeah...

> Some PDP-11 models had a virtual addressing feature called PLAS
> (Program Logical Address Space).  The PDP-11 had 16-bit addressing,
> allowing for at most 64K per process.  To take advantage of physical
> memory larger than 64K, PLAS allowed multiple 64K virtual address
> spaces to be mapped to the larger physical memory.  Sort of the
> reverse of the usual virtual addressing scheme, where there is more
> virtual memory than physical memory.

Note that PLAS is not a PDP-11 hardware thing. PLAS was the name for the 
mechanism provided by the OS for applications to be able to access more 
than 64K of memory while still be limited by the virtual address space 
limit of 64K.
PLAS is in one way very similar to mmap, except that it's not backed by 
a file. But you create a memory region though the OS (giving it a name 
and a size, which can be more than 64K), and then you can map to it, 
specifying the offset into it and window size, as well as where to map 
to in your virtual address space.
This is realized by just using the pages of the MMU of the PDP-11 map to 
different parts and things.
Any OS that had the PLAS capability by necessity had to have an MMU, 
which was the hardware part that allowed this to be implemented.
So, all PDP-11s with an MMU could allow the OS running on it to provide 
the PLAS capabilities.

A PDP-11 in general is "reversed" in that the physical address space is 
much larger than the virtual one. Although, the same was also true on 
the VAX in the last iteration where the NVAX implementation allowed for 
a 34 bit physical address, while the virtual address space was still 
only 32 bits.

But that doesn't make the virtual memory any less virtual.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol