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I know the basic about the memory management unit, but I want know why it must be built in the hardware.

Rahmi Pruitt
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    Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25867304/virtual-memory-without-hardware-support I suppose you could do this without hardware support (in code by the operating system), but it would be terribly slow because every memory access would then need a system call. – Thilo Dec 04 '16 at 03:14
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    For the same reason that graphics operations are done in specialized hardware - performance. Doing it in code would make it too slow to be useful. – Ken White Dec 04 '16 at 05:06

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The MMU does not necessarily have to be build entirely in hardware. They can (and are) be implemented using microcode.

user3344003
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