PROCESS USING VIRTUAL ADDRESSING IN A NON-PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTION TO CONTROL THE COPYING OF A PAGE OF DATA IN OR BETWEEN MULTIPLE MEDIA

摘要

A single non-privileged instruction copies a page ofdata from a source virtual address to a destinationvirtual address, regardless of which of plural electronicstorage media contain the page locations, and without theintervention of any supervisory program when media andvirtual addressing have been previously determined for thelocations of the subject pages. The instruction is notrequired to specify which of the plural media it will use,does not require its user to know what backing media itwill access, does not require main storage (MS) to be oneof its backing media, and allows different types ofphysical addressing to be used by the different backingmedia. The instruction can lock any page for use in anMP. No physical direction of data movement is providedwithin the non-privileged machine instruction, which onlydesignates virtual direction of movement. The separationof virtual direction from physical direction is done byavoiding instruction control over selection of electronicmedia. The non-privileged instruction can neverthelessexpress a preference for obtaining a copy of thedestination page in an electronic medium in which thecontent of the page can be processed by furtherinstructions. Also, the instruction can cause invocationof a privileged control program to avoid the need for afollowing condition code test instruction. A privilegedinstruction is also provided to wait for the completion ofthe unprivileged instruction and to invalidate a non-MSmedium page whether it is unlocked or locked, eithercorrectly or incorrectly.