Skip to content

[Typo] chapter 8.2 change “that” to “what” #350

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Open
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion content/english/hpc/external-memory/virtual.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ Virtual memory gives each process the impression that it fully controls a contig

![](../img/virtual-memory.jpg)

To achieve this, the memory address space is divided into *pages* (typically 4KB in size), which are the base units of memory that the programs can request from the operating system. The memory system maintains a special hardware data structure called the *page table*, which contains the mappings of virtual page addresses to the physical ones. When a process accesses data using its virtual memory address, the memory system calculates its page number (by right-shifting it by $12$ if $4096=2^{12}$ is the page size), looks up in the page table that its physical address is, and forwards the read or write request to where that data is actually stored.
To achieve this, the memory address space is divided into *pages* (typically 4KB in size), which are the base units of memory that the programs can request from the operating system. The memory system maintains a special hardware data structure called the *page table*, which contains the mappings of virtual page addresses to the physical ones. When a process accesses data using its virtual memory address, the memory system calculates its page number (by right-shifting it by $12$ if $4096=2^{12}$ is the page size), looks up in the page table what its physical address is, and forwards the read or write request to where that data is actually stored.

Since the address translation needs to be done for each memory request, and the number of memory pages itself may be large (e.g., 16G RAM / 4K page size = 4M pages), address translation poses a difficult problem in itself. One way to speed it up is to use a special cache for the page table itself called *translation lookaside buffer* (TLB), and the other is to [increase the page size](/hpc/cpu-cache/paging) so that the total number of memory pages is made smaller at the cost of reduced granularity.

Expand Down