Extending the Mach External Pager Interface to Accomodate User-Level Page Replacement Policies

The Mach external pager interface allows applications to supply their own routines for moving pages to and from second-level store. Mach doesn’t allow applications to choose their own page replacement policy, however. Some applications have access patterns that may make least recently used page replacement inappropriate. In this paper, we describe an extension to the external pager interface that allows the programmer to specify the page replacement policy as well as the backing storage for a region of virtual memory.