Representing Contiguity in Page Table for Memory Management Units

Abstract

Conventional page based memory management schemes have certain overheads related to system performance and memory utilization mainly due to page table walks. In addition, the conventional translation look-aside buffers often suffer from the limited capacity. To reduce these problems, we propose an efficient scheme that accommodates the contiguity information in a page table. The presented memory management unit exploits the contiguity information. As a result, we can reduce the page table walks as certain physical memory is allocated in the contiguous way. Considering the conventional scheme as a reference, the comparative performance analysis and the simulation are conducted. Experiments with image processing applications indicate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the system performance, the memory utilization, and the utilization of a translation look-aside buffer.