Physical Address Extension(物理地址扩展)

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In computing , Physical Address Extension (PAE ) is a feature of some x86 and x86-64 processors that enables the use of more than 4 gigabytes ^{[ 1]} of physical memory to be used in 32-bit systems - given appropriate operating system support. PAE is provided by Intel Pentium Pro (and above) CPUs - including all later Pentium-series processors except the 400 MHz bus versions of the Pentium M , as well as by other processors such as the AMD Athlon and later AMD processor models with similar or more advanced versions of the same architecture.

x86 processor hardware architecture is augmented with additional address lines used to select the additional memory, so physical address size is increased from 32 bits to 36 bits. This, theoretically, increases maximum physical memory size from 4 GB to 64 GB. The 32-bit size of the virtual address is not changed, so regular application software continues to use instructions with 32-bit addresses and (in a flat memory model ) is limited to 4 gigabytes of virtual address space. The operating system uses page tables to map this 4 GB address space into the 64 GB of virtual memory. The mapping is typically applied differently for each process . In this way, the extra memory is useful even though no single regular application can access it all simultaneously.

For application software which needs access to more than 4 GB of RAM, some special mechanisms may be provided by the operating system in addition to the regular PAE support. On Microsoft Windows this mechanism is called Address Windowing Extensions , while on Unix-like systems a variety of techniques are used, such as using mmap() to map regions of a file into and out.

 

 

在计算机科学 中，物理地址扩展 或实体位置延伸 （PAE ）是指x86 和x86-64 处理器 的一个特色，即如果操作系统 提供适当支持，则可以在32位 的系统中使用超过4Gi B字节的实体内存 。PAE为Intel Pentium Pro 及以上级别的CPU （包括除了总线频率为400MHz的这个版本的奔腾M 之外的所有新型号奔腾系列处理器）所支持，其他兼容的处理器，如速龙 （Athlon）和AMD 的较新型号的CPU也支持PAE。

x86的处理器增加了额外的地址线以选择那些增加了的内存，所以实体内存的大小从32位增加到了36位。最大的实体内存由4Gi B增加到了64GiB。

32位的虚拟地址 （线性地址 ）则没有变，所以一般的应用软件可以继续使用地址为32位的指令；如果用平面内存模式 的话，这些软件的地址空间也被限制为4GiB。操作系统用页表 将这4GiB的地址空间映射到大小为64GiB的实体内存，而这个映射对各个进程 一般是不一样的。这样一来，即使不能为单单一个程序所用，那些增加了的物理内存仍然可以发挥作用。

对于需要超过4GiB内存的应用软件来说，除了一般的PAE支持，还需要操作系统提供另外的特殊的技术。在Windows 上，这种技术叫做Address Windowing Extensions （AWE）。而在类Unix 的系统上则有多种技术在使用，例如使用mmap() 按需要把一部分文件映射到地址空间；但是，这还没有成为一个标准。

 

 

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