Virtual memory support for multiple page sizes

Abstract

The advent of computers with 64-bit virtual address spaces and giga-bytes of physical memory will provide applications with many more orders of magnitude of memory than is possible today. However, to tap the potential of this new hardware, we need to re-examine how virtual memory is traditionally managed. We concentrate in this note on two aspects of virtual memory: software support for multiple page sizes, and memory management policies tuned to large amounts of physical memory. We argue for the need to examine these areas, and we identify several questions that need to be answered. In particular, we show that providing support for multiple page sizes is not as straightforward as may initially appear.<>