research-article

Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems

Authors:

Benjamin Serebrin,

Francesco Spadini,

Srilatha ManneAuthors Info & Claims

ASPLOS XIII: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

Pages 26 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/1346281.1346286

Published: 01 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for hypervisor intervention in guest page table management. However, the extra dimension also increases the maximum number of architecturally-required page table references.

This paper presents an in-depth examination of the 2D page table walk overhead and options for decreasing it. These options include using the AMD Opteron processor's page walk cache to exploit the strong reuse of page entry references. For a mix of server and SPEC benchmarks, the presented results show a 15%-38% improvement in guest performance by extending the existing page walk cache to also store the nested dimension of the 2D page walk. Caching nested page table translations and skipping multiple page entry references produce an additional 3%-7% improvement.

Much of the remaining 2D page walk overhead is due to low-locality nested page entry references, which result in additional memory hierarchy misses. By using large pages, the hypervisor can eliminate many of these long-latency accesses and further improve the guest performance by 3%-22%.

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Cited By

Zhou YWilkening MMickens JYu M(2024)SmartNIC Security Isolation in the Cloud with S-NICProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650071(851-869)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627703.3650071
Du DYang BXia YChen H(2023)Accelerating Extra Dimensional Page Walks for Confidential ComputingProceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3613424.3614293(654-669)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613424.3614293
Parra PDa Silva ALosa BGarcía JPolo ÓMartínez ASánchez S(2023)Tailor-made Virtualization Monitor Design for CPU Virtualization on LEON ProcessorsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/358470222:4(1-32)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
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Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems

Recommendations

Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems
ASPLOS '08

Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for ...
Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems
ASPLOS '08

Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for ...
Accelerating two-dimensional page walks for virtualized systems
ASPLOS '08

Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for ...

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cover image ACM Conferences

ASPLOS XIII: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

March 2008

352 pages

ISBN:9781595939586

DOI:10.1145/1346281

General Chair:
Susan Eggers
University of Washington, USA
,
Program Chair:
James Larus
Microsoft Research, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 43, Issue 3
ASPLOS '08
March 2008
339 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1353536
Issue’s Table of Contents
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 36, Issue 1
ASPLOS '08
March 2008
339 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/1353534
Issue’s Table of Contents
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 42, Issue 2
ASPLOS '08
March 2008
339 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/1353535
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 01 March 2008

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Cited By

Zhou YWilkening MMickens JYu M(2024)SmartNIC Security Isolation in the Cloud with S-NICProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650071(851-869)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627703.3650071
Du DYang BXia YChen H(2023)Accelerating Extra Dimensional Page Walks for Confidential ComputingProceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3613424.3614293(654-669)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613424.3614293
Parra PDa Silva ALosa BGarcía JPolo ÓMartínez ASánchez S(2023)Tailor-made Virtualization Monitor Design for CPU Virtualization on LEON ProcessorsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/358470222:4(1-32)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584702
Gosakan KHan JKuszmaul WMubarek IMukherjee NSriram KTagliavini GWest EBender MBhattacharjee AConway AFarach-Colton MGandhi JJohnson RKannan SPorter DAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Mosaic Pages: Big TLB Reach with Small PagesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582021(433-448)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
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Zhao KXue KWang ZSchatzberg DYang LManousis AWeiner JVan Riel RSharma BTang CSkarlatos DSolihin YHeinrich M(2023)Contiguitas: The Pursuit of Physical Memory Contiguity in DatacentersProceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3579371.3589079(1-15)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
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Jia WZhang JShan JDing XFedorova ANarayanan DDi Luna GQuerzoni L(2023)Making Dynamic Page Coalescing Effective on Virtualized CloudsProceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3552326.3567487(298-313)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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Sá BValente LMartins JRossi DBenini LPinto S(2023)CVA6 RISC-V Virtualization: Architecture, Microarchitecture, and Design Space ExplorationIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems10.1109/TVLSI.2023.330283731:11(1713-1726)Online publication date: Nov-2023
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Jia WZhang JShan JDu YDing XXu T(2023)HugeGPT: Storing Guest Page Tables on Host Huge Pages to Accelerate Address Translation2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00014(62-73)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
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Stojkovic JMantri NSkarlatos DXu TTorrellas J(2023)Memory-Efficient Hashed Page Tables2023 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA56546.2023.10071061(1221-1235)Online publication date: Feb-2023
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Ewais MChow P(2023)Disaggregated Memory in the Datacenter: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.325040711(20688-20712)Online publication date: 2023
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