Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Address bits again, Article on new mainframe use Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 16:38 +0100 (BST) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 27 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: jgd@cix.co.uk Injection-Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2024 17:38:06 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="cd67fedf94c685af89cfb7b09faaf216"; logging-data="4096337"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/NuDM+ymf3taEJNlYt8wklWNbcMpEEY5I=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:HMGr/DJKLSILEZ7xC38Kbi8uVJQ= X-Clacks-Overhead-header: GNU Terry Pratchett Bytes: 2096 In article , johnl@taugh.com (John Levine) wrote: > I think they thought it was paging, but of course 8K pages were way > too large. So they overreacted and the Vax pages were 512 bytes > which were too small. Everyone seems to use 4K pages now, and that works well for ordinary-size programs in 32- and 64-bit address spaces. Bigger pages have been available in many operating systems for a couple of decades, but they seem to have been only used by programs that used memory in specialised ways, like database indexes, and they were used on a per-process basis. The interesting thing that's happening now is that Android 15, due for release soon, allows for devices that /only/ use 16K pages. Since there's no conventional paging, they presumably want to keep the page tables from eating too much RAM. > When I was working on the DOS version of Javelin we used a linker > that had overlays just like the mainframe linkers. I got it to work > and squeezed the code into about 1/3 the space it'd take otherwise > but it wasn't pleasant. Was that PLink, the Phoenix linker? The project I worked on in 1986-87 used that for similar squashing. John