Every walk’s a hit: making page walks single-access cache hits
Chang Hyun Park, Ilias Vougioukas, Andreas Sandberg, David Black-Schaffer
Abstract
As memory capacity has outstripped TLB coverage, large data applications suffer from frequent page table walks. We investigate two complementary techniques for addressing this cost: reducing the number of accesses required and reducing the latency of each access. The first approach is accomplished by opportunistically "flattening" the page table: merging two levels of traditional 4 KB page table nodes into a single 2 MB node, thereby reducing the table's depth and the number of indirections required to traverse it. The second is accomplished by biasing the cache replacement algorithm to keep page table entries during periods of high TLB miss rates, as these periods also see high data miss rates and are therefore more likely to benefit from having the smaller page table in the cache than to suffer from increased data cache misses.