Re: Address bits again, Article on new mainframe use

In article <vb9r4g$2o1f$1@gal.iecc.com>, johnl@taugh.com (John Levine)
wrote:

I think they thought it was paging, but of course 8K pages were way
too large.  So they overreacted and the Vax pages were 512 bytes
which were too small.

Everyone seems to use 4K pages now, and that works well for ordinary-size
programs in 32- and 64-bit address spaces. Bigger pages have been
available in many operating systems for a couple of decades, but they
seem to have been only used by programs that used memory in specialised
ways, like database indexes, and they were used on a per-process basis.

The interesting thing that's happening now is that Android 15, due for
release soon, allows for devices that /only/ use 16K pages. Since there's
no conventional paging, they presumably want to keep the page tables from
eating too much RAM.

When I was working on the DOS version of Javelin we used a linker
that had overlays just like the mainframe linkers. I got it to work
and squeezed the code into about 1/3 the space it'd take otherwise
but it wasn't pleasant.

Was that PLink, the Phoenix linker? The project I worked on in 1986-87
used that for similar squashing.

John