
8.5 Memory-Based Directory Protocols: The SGI Origin System 611
cally very expensive, which often annuls the advantage of doing the migration. The
major reason for the high cost is not so much moving the page (which with the
block transfer engine in the Hub takes about 25-30 |is for a 16-KB page) as changing
the virtual-to-physical mappings in the TLBs of all processors that have referenced
the page. Migrating a page keeps the virtual address the same but changes the physi-
cal address, so the old mappings in the page tables of processes are now invalid. As
page table entries are changed, it is important that the cached versions of those
entrie ...