Virtual address translation for wide-address architectures

Abstract

Operating systems employ virtual memory mechanism to provide large address space for programs. The efficiency of the virtual address translation plays an important role in determining system performance. In conventional virtual memory management systems, both the forward-mapped page table scheme and inverted page table scheme are widely used to organize the page tables that record translation data. These two schemes work well for 32-bit architectures, but not for wide address (64-bit) architectures. These two schemes either needs long translation time or incurs large memory overhead when translating wide virtual address. To cope with this problem, we propose a hybrid scheme to accelerate wide virtual address translation.