Exploring Superpage Promotion Policies for Efficient Address Translation

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dc.contributor.advisorRixner, Scott
dc.creatorZhu, Weixi
dc.date.accessioned2019-05-16T16:51:13Z
dc.date.available2019-05-16T16:51:13Z
dc.date.created2019-05
dc.date.issued2019-03-19
dc.date.submittedMay 2019
dc.date.updated2019-05-16T16:51:13Z
dc.description.abstractAddress translation performance for modern applications depends heavily upon the number of translation entries cached in the hardware TLB (translation look-aside buffer). Therefore, the efficiency of address translation relies directly on the TLB hit rate. The number of TLB entries continues to fall further behind the growth of memory consumption for modern applications. Superpages, which are pages with larger sizes, can increase the efficiency of the TLB by enabling each translation entry to cover a larger memory region. Without requiring more TLB entries, using superpages can increase the TLB hit rate and benefit address translation. However, using superpages can bring overhead. The TLB uses a single dirty bit to mark a page as dirty during address translation before modifying the page, so the granularity of the dirty bit corresponds to the coverage of the translation entry. As a result, the OS (operating system) will pay extra I/O effort when it allocates or writes an underutilized superpage back to disk. Such extra overhead can easily surpass the address translation benefits of superpages. This thesis discusses the performance trade-offs of superpages by exploring the design space of superpage promotion policies in the OS. A data collection infrastructure is built based on QEMU with kernel instrumentation on FreeBSD to collaboratively collect both memory accesses and kernel events. Then, the TLB behavior of Intel Skylake x86 family processors is simulated. The simulation has been validated to be faithful and consistent with the real-world performance. Last, this thesis evaluates and compares both TLB performance benefits and I/O overheads among the superpage promotion policies to discuss the trade-offs in the design space.
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.citationZhu, Weixi. "Exploring Superpage Promotion Policies for Efficient Address Translation." (2019) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105347">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105347</a>.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/105347
dc.language.isoeng
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.
dc.subjectAddress Translation
dc.subjectTLB
dc.subjectSuperpage
dc.subjectQEMU
dc.subjectSimulation
dc.subjectPromotion Policies
dc.titleExploring Superpage Promotion Policies for Efficient Address Translation
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.materialText
thesis.degree.departmentComputer Science
thesis.degree.disciplineEngineering
thesis.degree.grantorRice University
thesis.degree.levelMasters
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Science
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