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Date:      Wed, 30 Jan 2002 08:08:46 -0700 (MST)
From:      Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To:        <babkin@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>, <justin@mac.com>
Subject:   Re: OS Textbook FreeBSD Appendix
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201300804140.7168-100000@xed.acl.lanl.gov>
In-Reply-To: <200201300214.g0U2E3f62586@freefall.freebsd.org>

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On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 babkin@FreeBSD.ORG wrote:

> As far as I remember from reading the Lyons' book, there were
> 16 mapping descriptors for text and data each. I think, 1/16
> of the address space is not too big, and in absolute values
> it's the size of today's pages (4KB).

well I had dropped this thread as I figured the list would not want to
hear it, but yes you're right. The KT-11 MMU worked this way. I still have
my manuals, as it was a pretty interesting piece of hardware. Unix was the
first OS to actually use the split I/D capability, so while the various
DEC OSes were stuck at 64K Unix programs could run at 64kI/64kD. Also user
mode/super mode/kernel mode each got its own set.

There was also a weird instruction called MFPU (move from previous user
space) that allowed "bcopy shared memory"-type programming. Once again
Unix actually used this, the DEC OSes did not, so Unix was the first to
find the bugs in this hardware too. Once university as I recall actually
added the wire to its machine to make MFPU work correctly ...

The kinds of things you had to do in Unix on an 18-bit-physical address
space machine with 16-bit addressing bear interesting similarities to what
we have to do now on 36-bit mode Pentiums with 32-bit addresses. What goes
around comes around ...

ron


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