Publications Details

Samba: A Detailed Memory Management Unit (MMU) for the SST Simulation Framework

Awad, Amro A.; Voskuilen, Gwendolyn R.; Hammond, Simon D.; Hoekstra, Robert J.

The Memory Management Unit (MMU) is one of the most important parts of any modern computing system. It can be thought of as the hardware support for virtual memory, which enforces access permissions, and manages the translation of processes' virtual addresses into real memory physical addresses. The operating system (OS) allocates the physical memory in a small granularity frames that can be accessed by processes with appropriate permissions. Each process has the illusion of having an entire memory space, however, the actual addresses issued by the process, (`virtual addresses'), are translated into the physical frame address allocated by the OS through virtual memory.