HP-UX 11i Internals

The Kernel View: The Hashtable

The name pdir is a bit of a throwback. Originally, HP-UX used an inverse page directory that mapped physical page numbers to virtual page numbers. This meant that while the size of the table was easy to determine (simply one entry for each page), searching for a specific virtual address was a lengthy process. To reduce search times, a hashed table of virtual addresses was created. In this format, a virtual page address is used to create a hashtable index value. The index is then tested against a mask value to make sure the index doesn't exceed the size of the hashtable, and the result is used as an offset into the htbl (or htbl2_0).

The hashing algorithm varies according to the hardware width. For a narrow system, ...