Protection in Cray
Tzi-cker Chiueh
chiueh at sprite.Berkeley.EDU
Thu Dec 20 05:13:43 AEST 1990
The kind of protection I have in mind is access right control (e.g., read-only)
"Normal virtual memory systems" perform this kind of protection check while
doing logical-physical address mapping. The protection bits are either in page
tables or TLB. Now, since Cray doesn't have virtual memory, the question is
does it provide access control, if so, where does it put this check ?
>From the previous responses, it seemed that Cray only provides out-of-bound
protection check. Furthermore, this check is done for EVERY reference.
If this is indeed the case, this protection check process should be as
expensive as address mapping in machines that have VM.
So why does Cray get rid of virtual memory altogether ? Or does anybody
know how much performance improvement can we gain from getting rid of VM ?
tzi-cker
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