[haiku] Re: Why the MMU?
- From: "Zenja Solaja" <solaja@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:35:02 +1100
In the old days, OS's were very primitive and simple, and advanced memory
management was left as an exercise to the application programmer. I'm quite
sure that there were older applications which rolled out their own virtual
memory system (heck, even some modern apps do the same today to bypass 32bit
OS limitations). As the number of applications which duplicated this
feature increased, OS developers started realising that it might be a good
idea to roll out a common implementation usable by all applications that
needed it. OS's are constantly evolving and adding similar nice to have
features.
We all know that engineering is a compromise between adding features, cost
and efficiency. Yes, you can be faster and more efficient without a paging
system. But you lose quite a bit of functionality. For a general purpose
desktop OS (which is Haiku's primary goal), a system with MMU/paging/virtual
memory is mandatory. As others have already pointed out, stripping a lot of
Haiku's nicer features out in order to gain some more speed and efficiency
moves Haiku away from the desktop and towards embedded devices. IHMO, this
is not the direction the Haiku developers or users want to take.
Cheers.
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Jonas Sundström <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> "Andrew McCall" <andrew.mccall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...
>
> I would like to elaborate some on paging. I suspect a few people
> (surely not on this list! :) think paging = swapping = virtual memory.
> Some have bad experiences with swapping and might think virtual memory
> is bad overall.
>
>
>
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