Subject: new UNSW CSE technical report (fwd)

From: "Adam 'WeirdArms' Wiggins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 17:51:29 +1000 (EST)

For those of you interested.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 15:55:28 +1000 (EST)
From: Andrew Taylor <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: new UNSW CSE technical report

UNSW Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report no. UNSW-CSE-TR-9906
(20 pages: compressed postscript file 9906.ps.Z)

Title:   Fast Address-Space Switching on the StrongARM SA-1100 Processor

Authors: Adam Wiggins, Gernot Heiser
         School of Computer Science and Engineering 
         University of New South Wales
         Sydney 2052 Australia
	 E-mail: {awiggins,[email-masked]

Abstract:

The StrongARM SA-1100 is a high-speed low-power processor aimed at
embedded and portable applications. Its architecture features virtual
caches and TLBs which are not tagged by an address-space
identifier. Consequently, context switches on that processor are
potentially very expensive, as they may require complete flushes of TLBs
and caches.

This report presents the design of an address-space management technique
for the StrongARM which minimises TLB and cache flushes and thus
context switching costs. The basic idea is to implement the top-level of
the (hardware-walked) page-table as a cache for page directory entries
for different address spaces. This allows switching address spaces with
minimal overhead as long as the working sets do not overlap. For small
(<=32MB) address spaces further improvements are possible by
making use of the StrongARM's re-mapping facility. Our technique is
discussed in the context of the L4 microkernel in which it will be
implemented.

ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/doc/papers/UNSW/9906.ps.Z

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