Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

5-1994

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Trends toward shared-memory programming paradigms, large (64-bit) address spaces, and memory-mapped files have led some to propose the use of a single virtual-address space, shared by all processes and processors. Typical proposals require the single address space to contain all process-private data, shared data, and stored files. To simplify management of an address space where stale pointers make it difficult to re-use addresses, some have claimed that a 64-bit address space is sufficiently large that there is no need to ever re-use addresses. Unfortunately, there has been no data to either support or refute these claims, or to aid in the design of appropriate address-space management policies. In this paper, we present the results of extensive kernel-level tracing of the workstations in our department, and discuss the implications for single-address-space operating systems. We found that single-address-space systems will not outgrow the available address space, but only if reasonable space-allocation policies are used, and only if the system can adapt as larger address spaces become available.

DOI

10.1145/183019.183036

Original Citation

David Kotz and Preston Crow. The Expected Lifetime of “Single-Address-Space” Operating Systems. In Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, May 1994. DOI 10.1145/183019.183036.

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