Virtual Memory Management in VAX/VMS Operating System

This is a paper review.

Goal:

Provide a single env for applications such as: time-sharing, real-time and batch.

Also it will allow operation on different processors with different physical memory.

Real-time and batch applications have the requirement of time.

While time-sharing application has specific requirement for resource.

Implementation:

Each process has 32-bit virtual address space (21 bit for page address, 9 bits for offset that's totally 1Gbit), 当时最大的系统physical memory only has 8MB. The virtual address space is divided into pages of size 512 byte.

It also has a 32-bit page table to keep the page characteristics of pages such as: protection and modified. Each region, system, program and control has their own page table.

Pager & Swapper

Pager is used to decide which page should reside in memory, it swaps pages in and out.

Swapper swaps all the pages of a user program in and out.