LPE: Locality-Based Dead Prediction in Exclusive TLB for Large Coverage

Abstract

Translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is critical to modern multi-level memory systems’ performance. However, due to the limited size of the TLB itself, its address coverage is limited. Adopting a two-level exclusive TLB hierarchy can increase the coverage [M. Swanson, L. Stoller and J. Carter, Increasing TLB reach using superpages backed by shadow memory, 25th Annual Int. Symp. Computer Architecture (1998); H.P. Chang, T. Heo, J. Jeong and J. Huh Hybrid TLB coalescing: Improving TLB translation coverage under diverse fragmented memory allocations, ACM SIGARCH Comput. Arch. News 45 (2017) 444–456] to improve memory performance. However, after analyzing the existing two-level exclusive TLBs, we find that a large number of “dead” entries (they will have no further use) exist in the last-level TLB (LLT) for a long time, which occupy much cache space and result in low TLB hit-rate. Based on this observation, we first propose exploiting temporal and spatial locality to predict and identify dead entries in the exclusive LLT and remove them as soon as possible to leave room for more valid data to increase the TLB hit rates. Extensive experiments show that our method increases the average hit rate by 8.67%, to a maximum of 19.95%, and reduces total latency by an average of 9.82%, up to 24.41%.