Simple Solution: Bigger Pages

This lesson evaluates how increasing the size of a page makes page tables more memory-​efficient.

We could reduce the size of the page table in one simple way: use bigger pages. Take our 32-bit address space again, but this time assume 16KB pages. We would thus have an 18-bit VPN plus a 14-bit offset.

Assuming the same size for each PTE (4 bytes), we now have 2182^{18} entries in our linear page table and thus a total size of 1MB per page table, a factor of four reductions in the size of the page table (not surprisingly, the reduction exactly mirrors the factor of four increase in page size).

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