MANAGING A TRANSLATION LOOKASIDE BUFFER

摘要

Method and apparatus for managing a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) at hardware in a virtualization enabled system. According to embodiments of the present invention, a series of operations caused by TLB miss would not need intervening from the hypervisor. On the contrary, when a TLB miss occurs, the hardware directly issues an interrupt to a virtual machine. In this way, the TLB can be efficiently managed by means of a hardware-level auxiliary translation table. Therefore, system overheads can be greatly reduced and system performance can be improved. Methods and apparatuses associated with hardware, hypervisor, and virtual machine in a virtualization enabled system are disclosed, respectively.

主权项

1. A method for managing a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) at hardware in a virtualization enabled system, the method comprising:
querying the TLB with a guest virtual address indicated by a memory access instruction, the memory access instruction being received from a virtual machine running in the virtualization enabled system; in response to a miss of the guest virtual address in the TLB, issuing an interrupt to the virtual machine to cause the virtual machine to process the miss; and managing the TLB using an auxiliary translation table based on a result of a processing of the miss by the virtual machine, wherein an entry of the auxiliary translation table maps a guest physical address to a host physical address in the virtualization enabled system.