Rethinking TLB Designs in Virtualized Environments

Abstract

With increasing deployment of virtual machines for cloud services and server applications, memory address translation overheads in virtualized environments have received great attention. In the radix-4 type of page tables used in x86 architectures, a TLB-miss necessitates up to 24 memory references for one guest to host translation. While dedicated page walk caches and such recent enhancements eliminate many of these memory references, our measurements on the Intel Skylake processors indicate that many programs in virtualized mode of execution still spend hundreds of cycles for translations that do not hit in the TLBs. This paper presents an innovative scheme to reduce the cost of address translations by using a very large Translation Lookaside Buffer that is part of memory, the POM-TLB. In the POM-TLB, only one access is required instead of up to 24 accesses required in commonly used 2D walks with radix-4 type of page tables. Even if many of the 24 accesses may hit in the page walk caches, the aggregated cost of the many hits plus the overhead of occasional misses from page walk caches still exceeds the cost of one access to the POM-TLB. Since the POM-TLB is part of the memory space, TLB entries (as opposed to multiple page table entries) can be cached in large L2 and L3 data caches, yielding significant benefits. Through detailed evaluation running SPEC, PARSEC and graph workloads, we demonstrate that the proposed POM-TLB improves performance by approximately 10% on average. The improvement is more than 16% for 5 of the benchmarks. It is further seen that a POM-TLB of 16MB size can eliminate nearly all TLB misses in 8-core systems.