Intel x86 Assembly Language & Microarchitecture Paging - Virtual Addressing and Memory Pentium Paging

Example

When the Pentium was being developed, memory sizes, and the programs that ran in them, were getting larger. The OS had to do more and more work to maintain the Paging Subsystem just in the sheer number of Page Indexes that needed to be updated when large programs or data sets were being used.

So the Pentium designers added a simple trick: they put an extra bit in the Entries of the Page Directory that indicated whether the next level was a Page Table (as before) - or went directly to a 4 MB Page! By having the concept of 4 MB Pages, the OS wouldn't have to create a Page Table and fill it with 1,024 Entries that were basically indexing addresses 4K higher than the previous one.

Address layout

+-----------+----------------------+
| Dir Index | 4MB Byte Index       |
+-----------+----------------------+
 3         2 2                    0   Bit
 1         2 1                    0   number

Directory Entry layout

+-----------+----+---+------+-----+---+---+
| Page Addr | OS | S | Used | Sup | W | P |
+-----------+----+---+------+-----+---+---+
Page Addr = Top 20 bits of Page Table or Page address
OS        = Available for OS use
S         = Size of Next Level: 0 = Page Table, 1 = 4 MB Page
Used      = Whether this page has been accessed or written to
Sup       = Whether this page is Supervisory - onlly accessible by the OS
W         = Whether this page is allowed to be Written
P         = Whether this page is even Present

Of course, that had some ramifications:

• The 4 MB Page had to start on a 4 MB address boundary, just like the 4K Pages had to start on a 4K address boundary.
• All 4 MB had to belong to a single Program - or be shared by multiple ones.

This was perfect for use for large-memory peripherals, such as graphics adapters, that had large address space windows that needed to be mapped for the OS to use.