qTLB: Looking Inside the Look-Aside Buffer

Rapid evolution of multi-core platforms is putting additional stress on shared processor resources like TLB. TLBs have mostly been private resources for the application running on the core, due to the constant flushing of entries on context switches. Recent technologies like virtualization enable independent execution of software domains leading to performance issues because of interesting dynamics at the shared hardware resources. The advent of TLB tagging with application and VM identifiers, however, increases the lifespan of these resources. In this paper, we demonstrate that TLB tagging and refraining from flushing the hypervisor TLB entries during a VM context switch can lead to considerable performance benefits. We show that it is possible to improve the TLB performance of an important application by protecting its TLB entries from the interference of other low priority VMs/applications and providing differentiated service. We present our QoS architecture framework for TLB (qTLB)...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HIPC
• Authors: Omesh Tickoo, Hari Kannan, Vineet Chadha, Ramesh Illikkal, Ravi R. Iyer, Donald Newell
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HIPC 2007, Hypervisor Tlb Entries, TLB Entries, TLB Performance