Split instruction paging method.

摘要

Asynchronously transfers blocks of data (called pages) between two different electronic media of a data processing system. The different media may be a system main storage and a system expanded storage or a non-volatile external type of storage, either of which use different addressing than the main storage. All of these storages may be made of DRAM or SRAM technology with battery backup when necessary. The invention splits the involvement of a program requesting a page transfer into a pair of instructions per page transfer executing on one or more central processors. The first instruction of a pair starts another processor that controls the asynchronous page transfer, and the second instruction of the pair enables the communication of the end of the page transfer to the program. Neither instruction in the pair interrupts the program for the page transfer. A processor executing the starting instruction is immediately free to execute any other available instructions. Although both instructions in a pair may be executed by one processor, the pair may be executed by separate processors. And the execution of other instructions may overlap the page transfer between the execution of the pair. <IMAGE>