Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!jack
From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Random thoughts on paging.
Message-ID: <338@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: 25 May 88 09:00:10 GMT
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 24


Two idle thoughts I had on paging:

I have the feeling that a lot of programs will go through a fixed
sequence of page faults during startup. This is especially true of
programs like editors, that will always read your startup script and
execute numerous commands before finally entering interactive mode.

Now, it seems it would be worthwile to build a list of the first,
say, 50 pages in the order of need, and attach that to the program so
that the OS can immedeately start paging in the next page as soon as
it has started the program. This should reduce latency, and possibly
forestall future page faults.

Would this be worthwile? Has any work in this direcction been done?

Second thought: in a segmented architecture it would by nice to
do paging by the segment, in stead of per page. This way, you can put
each module (code+data) into a segment of it's own, and you'll only
experience one page fault when you first call printf(), in stead of
the current two or three.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl (or jack@mcvax.uucp)
	The shell is my oyster.