Separate data and function address spaces

D'Arcy Cain darcy at bbm.UUCP
Wed Nov 15 03:34:33 AEST 1989


In article <1989Nov12.152753.9282 at virtech.uucp> Conor P. Cahill writes:
>I believe it was in the original System V/386 Release 3.0 release notes, but
>I no longer have them around and can't check them.  However a check of the
>assembly language generated by the C compiler shows that it does no use
>any multi-segment function calls and/or data accesses.
>
The 386 still uses 32 bit addresses.  Using virtual memory features and
paging, the chip can access up to 64 Tb (64 trillion bytes).  Of course
each "segment" is limited to ONLY 4 gigabytes.  Once an application needs
more than this I suppose that the concept of models might make some sense
but I think technology may have moved on by then (and Intel's head office
will have moved to Andromeda).  In the meantime I think that our compilers
that treat it as a flat address space will work just fine.

D'Arcy J.M. Cain
darcy@(druid,bbm)



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list