When TLB is filled up, older addresses are overwritten. Just like CPU cache, the replacement policy is a potentially complex operation, but a simple and reasonable heuristic is to remove the least recently used entry (LRU).
With LRU, starting from state:adding
valid linear physical
----- ------ --------
> 1 00003 00005
1 00007 00009
1 00009 00001
1 0000B 000030000D -> 0000A would give: valid linear physical
----- ------ --------
1 0000D 0000A
> 1 00007 00009
1 00009 00001
1 0000B 00003Using the TLB makes translation faster, because the initial translation takes one access per TLB level, which means 2 on a simple 32 bit scheme, but 3 or 4 on 64 bit architectures.
The TLB is usually implemented as an expensive type of RAM called content-addressable memory (CAM). CAM implements an associative map on hardware, that is, a structure that given a key (linear address), retrieves a value.
Mappings could also be implemented on RAM addresses, but CAM mappings may required much less entries than a RAM mapping.
linear physical
------ --------
00000 00001
00001 00010
00010 00011
FFFFF 00000When the process changes,
cr3 change to point to the page table of the new current process.A simple and naive solution would be to completely invalidate the TLB whenever the
cr3 changes.However, this is would not be very efficient, because it often happens that we switch back to process 1 before process 2 has completely used up the entire TLB cache entries.
The solution for this is to use so called "Address Space Identifiers" (ASID) as mentioned in sources such as:
Basically, the OS assigns a different ASID for each process, and then TLB entries are automatically also tagged with that ASID. This way when the process makes an access, the TLB can determine if a hit is actually for the current process, or if it is an old address coincidence with another process.
The Linux kernel makes extensive usage of the paging features of x86 to allow fast process switches with small data fragmentation.
There are also however some features that the Linux kernel might not use, either because they are only for backwards compatibility, or because the Linux devs didn't feel it was worth it yet.
Convert virtual addresses to physical from user space with
/proc/<pid>/pagemap and from kernel space with virt_to_phys:Dump all page tables from userspace with
/proc/<pid>/maps and /proc/<pid>/pagemap:Read and write physical addresses from userspace with
/dev/mem:The Linux Kernel reserves two zones of virtual memory:
- one for kernel memory
- one for programs
The exact split is configured by
CONFIG_VMSPLIT_.... By default:- on 32-bit:
- on 64-bit: currently only 48-bits are actually used, split into two equally sized disjoint spaces. The Linux kernel just assigns:
- the bottom part to processes
00000000 00000000to008FFFFF FFFFFFFF - the top part to the kernel:
FFFF8000 00000000toFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF, like this:------------------ FFFFFFFF Kernel ------------------ C0000000 (not addressable) ------------------ BFFFFFFF Process ------------------ 00000000
- the bottom part to processes
Kernel memory is also paged.
In previous versions, the paging was continuous, but with HIGHMEM this changed.
There is no clear physical memory split: stackoverflow.com/questions/30471742/physical-memory-userspace-kernel-split-on-linux-x86-64
For each process, the virtual address space looks like this:
------------------ 2^32 - 1
Stack (grows down)
v v v v v v v v v
------------------
(unmapped)
------------------ Maximum stack size.
(unmapped)
-------------------
mmap
-------------------
(unmapped)
-------------------
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
brk (grows up)
-------------------
BSS
-------------------
Data
-------------------
Text
-------------------
------------------- 0The kernel maintains a list of pages that belong to each process, and synchronizes that with the paging.
If the program accesses memory that does not belong to it, the kernel handles a page-fault, and decides what to do:
When an ELF file is loaded by the kernel to start a program with the
exec system call, the kernel automatically registers text, data, BSS and stack for the program.The
brk and mmap areas can be modified by request of the program through the brk and mmap system calls. But the kernel can also deny the program those areas if there is not enough memory.brk and mmap can be used to implement malloc, or the so called "heap".mmap is also used to load dynamically loaded libraries into the program's memory so that it can access and run it.Stack allocation: stackoverflow.com/questions/17671423/stack-allocation-for-process
Calculating exact addresses Things are complicated by:
- Address Space Layout Randomization.
- the fact that environment variables, CLI arguments, and some ELF header data take up initial stack space: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/145557/how-does-stack-allocation-work-in-linux/239323#239323
Why the text does not start at 0: stackoverflow.com/questions/14795164/why-do-linux-program-text-sections-start-at-0x0804800-and-stack-tops-start-at-0
Those page faults only happen when a process tries to write to the page, and not read from it.
When Linux forks a process:
- instead of copying all the pages, which is unnecessarily costly, it makes the page tables of the two process point to the same physical address.
- it marks those linear addresses as read-only
- whenever one of the processes tries to write to a page, the makes a copy of the physical memory, and updates the pages of the two process to point to the two different physical addresses
Paging is done by the Memory Management Unit (MMU) part of the CPU.
It was later integrated into the CPU, but the term MMU still used.
Two level address translation to make OS emulation more efficient.
Peter Cordes mentions that some architectures like MIPS leave paging almost completely in the hands of software: a TLB miss runs an OS-supplied function to walk the page tables, and insert the new mapping into the TLB. In such architectures, the OS can use whatever data structure it wants.
Free:
- rutgers-pxk-416 chapter "Memory management: lecture notes"
Intel is known to have created customized chips for very large clients.
This is mentioned e.g. at: www.theregister.com/2021/03/23/google_to_build_server_socs/Those chips are then used only in large scale server deployments of those very large clients. Google is one of them most likely, given their penchant for Google custom hardware.
Intel is known to do custom-ish cuts of Xeons for big customers.
TODO better sources.
esolangs.org/wiki/Y86 mentions:
One specification at: web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~reeves.92/CSE2421sp13/PracticeProblemsY86.pdf
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact