Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site bocklin.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!hao!noao!arizona!bocklin!rogerh
From: rogerh@bocklin.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Page Size and the Meaning of Life .
Message-ID: <421@bocklin.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 2-Nov-85 21:10:59 EST
Article-I.D.: bocklin.421
Posted: Sat Nov  2 21:10:59 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Nov-85 06:42:44 EST
References: <407@unc.unc.UUCP> <765@inset.UUCP> <377@graffiti.UUCP> <380@graffiti.UUCP>
Reply-To: rogerh@arizona.UUCP (Roger Hayes)
Distribution: net
Organization: Dept of CS, U of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 10

About the worth of virtual memory on a honka-honka computation engine:
seems to me that the real case for virtual memory is that it fails soft.
If you have enough real memory, then you can keep all your pages in-core
and VM costs can be minimized by clever address translation; so you lose
what, 10%?  That's significant, but so is the advantage: with virtual 
memory, if you don't have enough real memory you take a gradual performance
hit.  With direct memory, you scrap the program and start over with some
pretty painful manual data-paging scheme.

Myself, I'm not clever enough to like mapping data to disk manually.