Problem 6 - Virtual Address Space

Most modern computer systems support a very large paged virtual address space ($2^{32}$ to $2^{64}$ bytes).

1.

Describe problems in implementing such a large virtual address space by using a single continuous page table.

2.

Show one paging mechanism used to implement such a large virtual address space in practical systems. (Describe the page table structure and the address translation scheme.) Discuss the performance of that mechanism comparing with the performance of the contiguous page table implementations.

See [SIL98] for a detailed answer.