Difference between revisions of "Base and bounds"

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'''Base and bounds''' is the term for one of the earliest mechanism used in [[time-sharing]] [[operating system]]s to prevent one user's erroneous (or hostile) program from interfering with the memory of another user (or the OS itself); i.e. to confine it to that area of [[main memory]] to which it had been assigned.
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'''Base and bounds''' (also '''base and limits''') is the term for one of the earliest [[memory management]] mechanisms. As the name suggests, it consisted of a pair of [[register]]s which gave the location in [[main memory]] (the 'base') of the [[user]]'s allocated memory area, and another which set a limit on the size of that area (the 'bound').
  
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As the name suggests, it consisted of a pair of [[register]]s which gave the location in main memory (the 'base') of the user's allocated memory area, and another which set a limit on the size of that area (the 'bound'). (Whether that limit was in terms of actual main memory, or in terms of the user's [[address space]], depended on the details of the hardware implementation, and was only relevant to the OS.)
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(Whether that limit was in terms of actual main memory, or in terms of the user's [[address space]], depended on the details of the hardware implementation, and was only relevant to the [[operating system]].)
  
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What ''was'' visible to the user was whether the address space visible to the program started at 0, or at the actual physical address of the memory assigned to that user. Doing the latter simplified programming, but required an [[adder]] in the path of addresses, which potentially had a performance impact (unless the delay caused could be overlapped with some other necessary operation).
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What ''was'' visible to the user was whether the address space visible to the program started at 0, or at the actual physical address of the memory assigned to that user. Doing the latter simplified programming, but required an [[adder]] in the path of [[address]]es, which potentially had a performance impact (unless the delay caused could be overlapped with some other necessary operation).
  
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Early [[International Business Machines|IBM]] [[System/360]] machines exposed the actual hardware addresses to users (hence the ubiquitous use of BALR instructions to load indexing registers), although the protection mechanism in their case was not a bounds register, but [[protection key]]s on each block of memory. Also, the adder was not done away with entirely - to prevent the need to re-link a program each time it was loaded, indexing registers were used extensively, needing an adder there.
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[[Category: CPU Basics]]

Latest revision as of 20:34, 15 December 2018

Base and bounds (also base and limits) is the term for one of the earliest memory management mechanisms. As the name suggests, it consisted of a pair of registers which gave the location in main memory (the 'base') of the user's allocated memory area, and another which set a limit on the size of that area (the 'bound').

(Whether that limit was in terms of actual main memory, or in terms of the user's address space, depended on the details of the hardware implementation, and was only relevant to the operating system.)

What was visible to the user was whether the address space visible to the program started at 0, or at the actual physical address of the memory assigned to that user. Doing the latter simplified programming, but required an adder in the path of addresses, which potentially had a performance impact (unless the delay caused could be overlapped with some other necessary operation).

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