[TUHS] /dev/drum

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > That would be a pretty ugly way to look at the world.

'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', and all that! :-)

    > Not to mention that one segment silently slides over into the next one
    > if it's more than 8K.

Again, precedent; IIRC, on the GE-645 Multics, segments were limited to 2^N-1 pages,
precisely because otherwise incrementing an inter-segment pointer could march off
the end of one, and into the next! (The -645 was implemented as a 'bag on the side'
of the non-segmented -635, so things like this were somewhat inevitable.)


    > wouldn't you say that the "chunks" on a PDP-11 are invisible to the
    > user? Unless you are the kernel of course. Or run without protection.

No, in MERT 'segments' (called that) were a basic system primitive, which
users had access to. (Very cool system! I really need to get moving on trying
to recover that...)


    > *Demand* paging is definitely a separate concept from virtual memory.

Hmmm. I understand your definitions, and like breaking things up into 'virtual
addressing' (which I prefer as the term, see below), 'non-residence' or
'demand loaded', and 'paging' (breaking into smallish, equal-sized chunks),
but the problem with using "virtual memory" as a term for the first is that to
most people, that term already has a meaning - the combination of all three.

(I have painful memories of this sort of thing - the term 'locator' was
invented after we gave up trying to convince people one could have a network
architecture in which not all packets contained addresses. That caused a major
'does not compute' fault in most people's brains! And 'locator' has since been
perverted from its original definition. But I digress.)


    > There is no real connection between virtual memory and memory
    > protection. One can exist with or without the other.

Virtual addressing and memory protection; yes, no connection. (Although the
former will often give you the latter - if process A can't see, or name, 
process B's memory, it can't damage it.)


    > Might have been just some internal early attempt that never got out of DEC?

Could be; something similar seems to have happened to the 'RK11-B':

  http://gunkies.org/wiki/RK11_disk_controller


    >> I don't have any problem with several different page sizes, _if it
    >> engineering sense to support them_.

    > So, would you then say that such machines do not have pages, but have 
    > segments?
    > Or where do you draw the line? Is it some function of how many different 
    > sized pages there can be before you would call it segments? ;-)

No, the number doesn't make a difference (to me). I'm trying to work out what
the key difference is; in part, it's that segments are first-class objects
which are visible to the user; paging is almost always hidden under the
sheets.

But not always; some OS's allow processes to share pages, or to map file pages
into address spaces, etc. Which does make it complex to separate the two..

     Noel