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Memory Management Unit
<hardware, memory management> (MMU, "Paged Memory Management
Unit", PMMU) A hardware device or circuit that supports
virtual memory and paging by translating virtual
addresses into physical addresses.
The virtual address space (the range of addresses used by
the processor) is divided into pages, whose size is 2^N,
usually a few kilobytes. The bottom N bits of the address
(the offset within a page) are left unchanged. The upper
address bits are the (virtual) page number. The MMU
contains a page table which is indexed (possibly
associatively) by the page number. Each page table entry
(PTE) gives the physical page number corresponding to the
virtual one. This is combined with the page offset to give
the complete physical address.
A PTE may also include information about whether the page has
been written to, when it was last used (for a least recently
used replacement algorithm), what kind of processes (user
mode, supervisor mode) may read and write it, and whether
it should be cached.
It is possible that no physical memory (RAM) has been
allocated to a given virtual page, in which case the MMU will
signal a "page fault" to the CPU. The operating system
will then try to find a spare page of RAM and set up a new PTE
to map it to the requested virtual address. If no RAM is free
it may be necessary to choose an existing page, using some
replacement algorithm, and save it to disk (this is known as
"paging"). There may also be a shortage of PTEs, in which
case the OS will have to free one for the new mapping.
In a multitasking system all processes compete for the use
of memory and of the MMU. Some memory management
architectures allow each process to have its own area or
configuration of the page table, with a mechanism to switch
between different mappings on a process switch. This means
that all processes can have the same virtual address space
rather than require load-time relocation.
An MMU also solves the problem of fragmentation of memory.
After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free
memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the
largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller
than the total amount. With virtual memory, a contiguous
range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several
non-contiguous blocks of physical memory.
In early designs memory management was performed by a separate
integrated circuit such as the MC 68851 used with the
Motorola 68020 CPU in the Macintosh II or the Z8015
used with the Zilog Z80 family of processors. Later CPUs
such as the Motorola 68030 and the ZILOG Z280 have MMUs on
the same IC as the CPU.
(1999-05-24)
Try this search on OneLook / Google
Nearby terms:
memory leak « memory location « memory management « Memory Management Unit » memory mapped I/O » memory protection » memory smash
This article was derived from the Free Online Dictionary of Computers and is available under ther terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
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