Using virtual memory to improve cache and tlb performance
Theodore H. Romer, Brian N. Bershad · 1998
This thesis introduces new operating system policies that use virtual memory to dynamically improve memory system performance. Overall application execution time is increasingly dependent on memory system performance, motivating the development of new techniques for reducing cache and translation lookaside buffer (TLB) miss rates. My thesis is that the operating system can effectively manage cache and TLB resources at runtime on behalf of applications. I develop and evaluate two examples of operating system memory system optimizations. First, I show how the operating system can optimize TLB performance by dynamically constructing superpages. I introduce a policy that analyzes the cause of each TLB miss, and uses this information to selectively create large pages, reducing the TLB miss rate without the increa...