Hi,
michaellangford wrote:
Should I go ahead and modify this to reflect what is really going on, let someone more qualified than me do it, or leave it alone? I am also wondering if the article itself is really just written in layman's terms because that was who it was written for. Your thoughts? ...
You should probably leave it alone.
Unfortunately "paging" has multiple meanings (even within the context of computer systems alone). The oldest and most correct is a synonym for "swapping" (transferring data to/from swap space), and the wikipedia page reflects this oldest and most correct meaning.
Other uses of "paging" (e.g. to mean "the virtual memory system as a whole not limited to swapping") are common colloquialism.
There is an argument that language evolves and the meanings of words change over time; and that at some point in time the previously correct meaning (swapping) becomes out-dated and replaced by previously informal meanings. However this causes a difficulty in determining when that point in time would be (or if it has passed already); and language usually evolves relatively slowly (e.g. taking hundreds of years before a word like "great" no longer means "immense" and can be used correctly to mean "impressive" in formal writing) while computer systems evolve much faster.
OSwhatever wrote:
Read the section "Addressing limits on 32-bit hardware". I can't get my head around this text. It's a hairy mix of hardware limitations, software workarounds and sometimes system specific issues.
That part of it is badly written (imprecise - e.g. using "RAM" when they mean "physical address space", etc).
Cheers,
Brendan