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Date:      Fri, 18 Feb 2000 17:02:14 -0800
From:      Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 64bit OS?
Message-ID:  <20000218170214.D18203@sharmas.dhs.org>
In-Reply-To: <200002190006.QAA82061@apollo.backplane.com>; from Matthew Dillon on Fri, Feb 18, 2000 at 04:06:55PM -0800
References:  <20000218150219.A17763@sharmas.dhs.org> <200002190006.QAA82061@apollo.backplane.com>

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On Fri, Feb 18, 2000 at 04:06:55PM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     If I understand the hardware hash table method correctly, then
>     I think the absolute best choice for FreeBSD is to use that method
>     as it will allow us to get rid of the scaleability problems we have
>     with the pv_entry_t scheme we use for IA32.  The number of pv_entry_t's
>     in an IA64 architecture wind up being fixed.  How big can we make the 
>     hardware-assisted hash table?

Smaller than 2**64. Minimum is 2**15.

> 
>     Also, a hash table scheme is a much better fit for a 64 bit address
>     space model, especially with sparse mappings.  The MIPS R4K and later
>     all use a hash table scheme and it seems to work well for them.
> 

Madhu Talluri's paper on page tables for 64 bit address spaces claims that
having collision chains is expensive - for 8 bytes of mapping information,
the pointer and tag storage overhead is 16 bytes.

Though page table space is important, in the age of big memory computers,
I think performance and manageability are more important.

	-Arun


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