The DASH Virtual Memory System

The DASH project has defined the network communication architecture for a large, high-performance distributed system. We are now designing a portable operating system kernel for the nodes of this system. The kernel is designed to run on shared-memory multiprocessors, and to exploit the performance potential of such machines. This report describes the DASH kernel''s virtual memory (VM) system. The following are key features of the VM system: * A virtual address space is partitioned into three regions, each providing a specific function: 1) private memory, 2) read-only shared memory, and 3) interprocess communication (IPC) buffers. * The IPC region uses VM remapping to provide data movement between virtual address spaces. Software copying is minimized. * Tasks such as page zeroing and pageout are done by processes that can execute concurrently with other activities. * Most of the VM system implementation is machine-independent. The interface of the machine-dependent part is designed to allow efficient implementation on a range of architectures.

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