See MIPS Run, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6 Low-level Memory Management and the TLB

We’ve tended to introduce most topics in this book from the bottom, which is perhaps natural in a book about low-level computer architecture. But—unless you’re already pretty familiar with a virtual memory system and how it’s used by an OS—you’re recommended to turn now to section 14.4, which describes how virtual memory management works in Linux. Once that makes some sense to you, come back here for hardware details and to see how the hardware can be made to work in other contexts.

When we’re thinking top-down, the hardware is often called a memory-management unit or MMU. When we’re looking bottom-up, we focus on the main hardware item, known as the TLB (for “translation lookaside buffer,” ...