Paper reading homework

In preparation for lecture, first read the paper Practical, transparent operating system support for superpages, by Navarro et al (OSDI 2002).

The paper's Section 4.5 says that a superpage mapping is only inserted in a process's page table after the process has referenced every base (ordinary) page in the superpage's address range. Section 4.1 says that the physical RAM for an entire superpage is reserved on the very first reference to any base page in the superpage's address range. Given the latter policy, why doesn't the design also insert the superpage mapping at the same time, when the process first references any page in the superpage's address range?

Submit your answer in an ASCII text file named homework.txt to the corresponding "Lecture N" assignment on Gradescope.

---

Questions or comments regarding 6.1810? Send e-mail to the course staff at 61810-staff@lists.csail.mit.edu.