[TUHS] /dev/drum

[bqt@update.uu.se (Johnny Billquist)]

On 2018-05-06 15:07, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      > From: Johnny Billquist
> 
>      >> "A logical segment is a piece of contiguous memory, 32 to 32K 16-bit
>      >> words long [which can grow in increments of 32 words]"
> 
>      > But then it is not actually giving programs direct access and
>      > manipulation of the hardware. It is a software construct and service
>      > offered by the OS, and the OS might fiddly around with various hardware
>      > to give this service.
> 
> I don't understand how this is significant: most time-sharing OS's don't give
> the users access to the memory management control hardware?

Right. I would probably say that no time-sharing OS with any kind of 
protection between processes will allow direct access to the hardware.

My point being that (I think we agreed) pages are invisible to the 
process, while segments are very visible. And here we talk from a 
hardware point of view.

So why would it not be significant? It's what the whole definition was 
about.

>      > So the hardware is totally invisible after all.
> 
> Not quite - the semantics available for - and _visible_ to - the user are
> constrained by the mechanisms of the underlying hardware.

That is not the same thing as being visible. The OS gives you some 
mechanisms or services. The OS might base that design on restrictions 
imposed by the underlying hardware, but the underlying hardware is in 
fact totally invisible. A user process use services provided by the OS, 
and does not try to manipulate, or is even aware of the underlying hardware.

> Consider a machine with a KT11-B - it could not provide support for very small
> segments, or be able to adjust the segment size with such small quanta. On the
> other side, the KT11-B could support starting a 'software segment' at any
> 512-byte boundary in the virtual address space, unlike the KT11-C which only
> supports 8KB boundaries.

Yes. But a user program running under some OS with protection, would not 
allow you to access the hardware anyway.

Anything like the MERT segments can in fact be provided with both types 
of memory management. And the program will not be aware of which 
hardware is involved, or how to set this up. The OS deals with all of that.

There might be some constraints on where the segment can appear in your 
virtual address space, but that does not change the fact that the 
service can be provided by the OS with either hardware.

Or, to take RSX PLAS directives as an example. When you create a region 
(which is the equivalent to a segment), it can have alignment on either 
a 64B resolution, or a 512B resolution. And the OS will try to 
accomodate. And where it appears in your virtual memory space, and what 
offsets to use and so on can be requested, but the OS will then give you 
something as close as it can to this, based on hardware restrictions.

All of this is so similar to mmap() that we could in fact be having this 
exact discussion based on mmap() instead, if that were to help.
I don't see you claiming that every machine use a segmented model, but 
running any modern Unix on any hardware will give you this exact same 
tools. Read up on the mmap() system call, if you don't already know it.
Now, would you say that this system call makes the hardware directly 
visible and manipulated by the user program?

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol