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Fast Address-Space Switching on the StrongARM SA-1100 Processor
Canberra, Australia January 31-February 03
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ACAC.2000.8243305th Australasian Computer Architectur ...
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Adam Wiggins, University of New South Wales
Gernot Heiser, University of New South Wales
The StrongARM SA-1100 is a high-speed low-power processor aimed at embedded and portable applications. Its architecture features virtual caches and TLBs which are not tagged by an address-space identifier. Consequently, context switches on that processor are potentially very expensive, as they may require complete flushes of TLBs and caches.This paper presents the design of an address-space management technique for the StrongARM which minimizes TLB and cache flushes and thus context switching costs. The basic idea is to implement the top-level of the (hardware-walked) page-table as a cache for page directory entries for different address spaces. This allows switching address spaces with minimal overhead as long as the working sets do not overlap. For small (_ 32 MB) address spaces further improvements are possible by making use of the Strong-ARM's re-mapping facility. Our technique is discussed in the context of the L4 microkernel in which it will be implemented.
Citation:
Adam Wiggins, Gernot Heiser, "Fast Address-Space Switching on the StrongARM SA-1100 Processor," acac, pp.97, 5th Australasian Computer Architecture Conference, 2000
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