Segmentation and Address Translation

Introduction

This shows the function used to map a logical address to a physical address for some segmentation schemes. Throughout this handout, an address in virtual memory is a pair (segment, offset) where segment is the segment number within the logical address space and offset the offset into that segment. We will assume the entire program is in memory, so no error handling is given; were this assumption false, the situation where the requested address were not in memory would need to be handled (by generating a segment fault and loading the necessary segment).

Segmentation

As with paging address translation with direct mapping, the segment table is stored in memory, and a pointer to its base in a register called the segment table base register. Let the segment table base register be called st_base_register, and let memory represent the main store of the computer. Then:

function NL_map((segment, offset)): physical_address;
begin
	NL_map := memory[st_base_register + segment] + offset;
end (* NL_map *)