Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC-I - 4 Overview of the MMU; Introduction; Virtual Address Translation

Sun Microelectronics
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Overview of the MMU 4
4.1 Introduction
This chapter describes the UltraSPARC Memory Management Unit as it is seen by
the operating system software. The UltraSPARC MMU conforms to the require-
ments set forth in The SPARC Architecture Manual, Version 9.
Note: The UltraSPARC MMU does not conform to the SPARC-V8 Reference
MMU Specification. In particular, the UltraSPARC MMU supports a 44-bit virtual
address space, software TLB miss processing only (no hardware page table walk),
simplified protection encoding, and multiple page sizes. All of these differ from
features required of SPARC-V8 Reference MMUs.
4.2 Virtual Address Translation
The UltraSPARC MMU supports four page sizes: 8 Kb, 64 Kb, 512 Kb, and 4 Mb.
It supports a 44-bit virtual address space, with 41 bits of physical address. During
each processor cycle the UltraSPARC MMU provides one instruction and one
data virtual-to-physical address translation. In each translation, the virtual page
number is replaced by a physical page number, which is concatenated with the
page offset to form the full physical address, as illustrated in Figure 4-1 on page
22. (This figure shows the full 64-bit virtual address, even though UltraSPARC
supports only 44 bits of VA.)
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