Memory Management Unit

MMU, short for Memory Management Unit, is a class of computer hardware components responsible for handling memory accesses requested by the CPU. Among the functions of such devices are the translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses (i.e., virtual memory management), memory protection, cache control, bus arbitration, and, in simpler computer architectures (especially 8-bit systems), bank switching. Modern MMUs typically divide the virtual address space (the range of addresses used by the processor) into pages, whose size is 2N, usually a few kilobytes. The bottom N bits of the address (the offset within a page) are left unchanged. The upper address bits are the (virtual) page number. The MMU normally translates virtual page numbers to physical page numbers via an associative cache called a TLB. When the TLB lacks a translation, a slower mechanism involving hardware-specific data structures or software assistance will be used. The data items found in such data structures are typically called page table entries (PTEs), and the data structure itself is typically called a page table. The physical page number is combined with the page offset to give the complete physical address.

A PTE or TLB entry may also include information about whether the page has been written to (the dirty bit), when it was last used (the accessed bit, for a least recently used page replacement algorithm), what kind of processes (user mode, supervisor mode) may read and write it, and whether it should be cached. It is possible that TLB entry or PTE prohibits access to a virtual page, perhaps because no physical memory (RAM) has been allocated to that virtual page. In this case the MMU will signal a page fault to the CPU. The operating system will then handle the situation appropriately, perhaps by trying to find a spare page of RAM and set up a new PTE to map it to the requested virtual address. If no RAM is free it may be necessary to choose an existing page, using some replacement algorithm, and save it to disk (this is known as "paging"). With some MMUs there can also be a shortage of PTEs or TLB entries, in which case the OS will have to free one for the new mapping.

In some cases a "page fault" may indicate a software bug. A key benefit of an MMU is memory protection: an operating system can use it to protect against errant programs, by disallowing access to memory that a particular program should not have access to. Typically, an operating system assigns each program its own virtual address space.

An MMU also reduces the problem of fragmentation of memory. After blocks of memory have been allocated and freed, the free memory may become fragmented (discontinuous) so that the largest contiguous block of free memory may be much smaller than the total amount. With virtual memory, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory. In early designs memory management was performed by a separate integrated circuit such as the MC 68851 used with the Motorola 68020 CPU in the Macintosh II or the Z8015 used with the Zilog Z80 family of processors. Later CPUs such as the Motorola 68030 and the ZILOG Z280 have MMUs on the same IC as the CPU.

While this article concentrates on modern MMUs, which almost invariably use paging, other systems like segmentation and base-limit addressing (of which the former is a development) have been used in MMU and are occasionally still present on modern architectures; perhaps most notably, the x86 ISA provides for segmentation in addition to paging.