I have now written some very basic but functional paging code for the Microblaze but have realised I am, essentially, going to have to start a lot of it again.
The Microblaze puts page tables firmly under software control and its memory management unit (MMU) concentrates on managing page references through its translation lookaside buffers (TLBs) instead. So a reference to a virtual address that is mapped in a TLB is handled invisibly to the user or programmer, but a reference to a memory address that may be mapped in a page table but not in the TLB generates an exception and everything is dumped into the lap of the programmer – this is what is often known as a “soft fault” (a “hard fault” being when there is no version of the page being referenced available in physical memory at all).
The number of TLBs is quite limited – just 64 – so to handle (or in my case, simulate), say, 512kB of physical memory through 4kB page frames you need to expect to handle quite a few soft as well as hard faults and so you need to take a view on which mappings get evicted from the TLB and – if you are referencing more than 512kB of program and data – which pages get evicted from the page table and, hence, physical memory.
This is where the difficulties start, because there is no simple way to know when a read through a TLB mapping takes place – the very point is that it is invisible (and hence quick) to the programmer or any software she or he may have written. The problem with that is that – for most situations – the only guide you have to future behaviour in terms of memory references is past behaviour: so it would be very helpful to know whether a page has been recently accessed (on the basis that if it was accessed recently then it will be accessed again soon).
The standard response to this sort of problem is some form of “CLOCK” algorithm – which was first implemented, I believe, for the Multics operating system.
Multics can be thought of as the estranged (and now late) father of Unix – the “Uni” being a play on the “Multi” of the earlier system – and both direction and through its offspring its influence on computers has been profound and one of our inheritances is CLOCK, some version of which is almost certainly running in the computer, phone or tablet on which you are reading this.
The principle of CLOCK is simple. A “clock hand” sweeps regularly through the page mappings marking them invalid, then on a subsequent attempt to reuse the page mapping the valid bit has to be reset (meaning the page has been used recently) or alternatively if a new mapping is needed then we can through out the first page in the list of mappings where the mapping is marked as invalid.
And this, or some version of it is what I am now going to have to implement for the Microblaze. The obvious thing to do is to have some sort of timer interrupt drive the time clock – though I am not even sure the Microblaze has a timer interrupt available – I’m guessing it doesn’t – as it would expect those to come from the board, so this could be tricky!
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– you can look me up in the preview there. The article that references my work is by the great Peter J. Denning, the “father” of the working set.
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(now subtitled “the book that inspired the film The Imitation Game”) but I know enough to doubt that there really was a late-night post-boozing moment when the bombe machine started to work (this appears to be an attempt to lump the success of the bombe and Turing’s insight into German naval codes into one gloriously cinematic moment) and I certainly know that Turing did not spend – as the film implies if not explicitly states – the whole of the war at 
