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From: earl@mips.UUCP (Earl Killian)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Software Page Table Machines
Message-ID: <401@gumby.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-May-87 02:43:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: gumby.401
Posted: Sun May 17 02:43:26 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 17-May-87 11:55:58 EDT
References: <1968@husc6.UUCP> <668@stride.Stride.COM>
Lines: 13

In article <668@stride.Stride.COM>, mitch@stride1.UUCP (Thomas P. Mitchell)
asks about per process disk optimizations.

I don't think this is uncommon in operating systems.  Systems are
often written to accept "hints" from programs.

One example: the ITS operating system (for the PDP10) has system calls
to declare that part of your virtual memory (which can be mapped to a
file or not) is going to be referenced sequentially.  When you page
fault on page I it starts the disk read for I+N (or I-N) depending on
what the user specified.  One use of this was in the editor (the
original EMACS); string searches used this mechanism to get the pages
to be scanned read in faster.