Leveraging Sharing in Second Level Translation-Lookaside Buffers for Chip Multiprocessors

Abstract

Traversing page table during virtual to physical address translation causes significant pipeline stalls when misses occur in the translation-lookaside buffer (TLB). To mitigate this penalty, we propose a fast, scalable, multi-level TLB organization that leverages page sharing behaviors and performs efficient TLB entry placement. Our proposed partial sharing TLB (PSTLB) reduces TLB misses by around 60%. PSTLB also improves TLB performance by nearly 40% compared to traditional private TLBs and 17% over the state of the art scalable TLB proposal.