Hacker News Reader

That's not entirely correct. The MMU generally handles virtual to physical memory address translation and the OS is only ever involved if there is a page fault. Outside of OS architecture and very specific and intended application, virtual/physical memory is completely transparent. When I hear "virtual memory" I assume reference to swap space unless otherwise noted because the technical meaning has such a specific domain.

View on HN

That's why I noted that the CPU caches the mappings in the TLB. On modern processors, the MMU is integrated with the rest of the processor, so I didn't see the need to introduce another TLA. It's a part of the processor just as much as, say, the floating point unit is. The whole point of my discussion with small pointer values was to demonstrate that the virtual to physical mapping is transparent.

When I hear "virtual memory," I think of the computer science meaning. However, I am a researcher in high performance computing systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com