Virtual memory has been a standard hardware feature for more than three decades. At the price of increased hardware complexity, it has simplified software and promised strong isolation among colocated processes. In modern computing systems, however, the costs of virtual memory have increased significantly. With large memory workloads, virtualized environments, data center computing, and chips with multiple DMA devices, virtual memory can degrade performance and increase power usage. We therefore explore the implications of building applications and operating systems without relying on hardware support for address translation. Primarily, we investigate the implications of removing the abstraction of large contiguous memory segments. Our experiments show that the overhead to remove this reliance is surprisingly small for real programs. We expect this small overhead to be worth the benefit of reducing the complexity and energy usage of address translation. In fact, in some cases, performance can even improve when address translation is avoided.

中文翻译：

---

没有虚拟内存的基于软件的内存管理的成本

三十多年来，虚拟内存一直是标准硬件功能。以增加硬件复杂性为代价，它简化了软件并承诺在协同定位的进程之间进行强隔离。然而，在现代计算系统中，虚拟内存的成本已显着增加。对于大型内存工作负载、虚拟化环境、数据中心计算和具有多个 DMA 设备的芯片，虚拟内存会降低性能并增加功耗。因此，我们探索了在不依赖硬件支持地址转换的情况下构建应用程序和操作系统的含义。首先，我们研究了删除大型连续内存段的抽象的含义。我们的实验表明，对于真实程序来说，消除这种依赖的开销非常小。我们预计这种小开销对于降低地址转换的复杂性和能源使用的好处是值得的。事实上，在某些情况下，避免地址转换甚至可以提高性能。