Enhancing the Efficiency of Memory Management in a Super-Paging Environment by AMSQM - Advanced Operating Systems and Kernel Applications - page 276

Chapter 14
Enhancing the Efficiency
of Memory Management
in a Super-Paging
Environment by AMSQM

Moshe Itshak
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Yair Wiseman
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

abStract

The concept of Super-Paging has been wandering around for more than a decade. Super-Pages are
supported by some operating systems. In addition, there are some interesting research papers that show
interesting ideas how to intelligently integrate Super-Pages into modern operating systems; however,
the page replacement algorithms used by the contemporary operating system even now use the old
Clock algorithm which does not prioritize small or large pages based on their size. In this chapter
an algorithm for page replacement in a Super-Page environment is presented. The new technique for
page replacement decisions is based on the page size and other parameters; hence is appropriate for a
Super-Paging environment.

introduction

memory that can be pointed to directly by the
TLB) has been increased by a much lower factor
during the same period (Navarro, 2004), (Navarro
et al., 2002). Therefore, several new architectures
like Itanium, MIPS R4x00, Alpha, SPARC and HP
PA RISC support multiple page size of the frames
pointed to by the TLB. In that way the memory size
pointed to directly by the TLB is higher and the
overhead of the page table access time is reduced.
There are also some particular operating systems

The paging concept is very old and well-known.
Super-Paging is an augmentation for this well-
known concept. Super-Pages are larger pages that
are pointed to by the TLB (Khalidi et al., 1993).
The internal memory of modern computers has
been drastically increased during the last decades.
However, the TLB coverage (i.e. the size of the