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Texas Persistant Store

Paul R. Wilson and Sheetal V. Kakkad Object-Oriented Programming Systems research group (oops@cs.utexas.edu) Computer Sciences Dept., University of Texas at Austin

Texas is a free persistent store that can be used with standard C++ compilers, and works efficiently with very little modification to most C++ programs. It runs on several varieties of UNIX and should be very easy to port to most modern operating systems, such as OS/2, Windows NT, Mach, Windows 4.0, etc. (If things we hear are correct, Linux will provide the necessary virtual memory features soon, too, and Texas will be ported about fifteen minutes later. :-)

Texas uses "pointer swizzling at page fault time", an address translation techique that converts pointers from an abstract format to actual virtual memory addresses when pages are first touched and brought into memory. (A similar technique, invented independently, is used in the market-leading persistent store/OODB, ObjectStore from Object Design Inc.) This allows Texas to be highly portable, avoiding any assumptions about where a page of data will be an a process' virtual memory address space; it can also support very large addresses spaces efficiently on stock 32-bit hardware. (It could also be used to efficiently provide shared address spaces across networked heterogenous machines with different hardware address sizes, e.g., across 32- and 64-bit machines.)

mailing list : oops@cs.utexas.edu

ftp from cs.utexas.edu in pub/garbage/texas More info in pub/garbage/swizz.ps and pub/garbage/texaspstore.ps