Assuming an x86-based 4-level page table in both guest and nested page table, how many memory references
Question:
Assuming an x86-based 4-level page table in both guest and nested page table, how many memory references are needed to service a TLB miss for native vs. nested page table?
To support multiple virtual machines, two levels of memory virtualization are needed. Each virtual machine still controls the mapping of virtual address (VA) to physical address (PA), while the hypervisor maps the physical address (PA) of each virtual machine to the actual machine address (MA). To accelerate such mappings, a software approach called "shadow paging" duplicates each virtual machine's page tables in the hypervisor, and intercepts VA to PA mapping changes to keep both copies consistent. To remove the complexity of shadow page tables, a hardware approach called nested page table (or extended page table) explicitly supports two classes of page tables (VA⇨PA and PA⇨MA) and can walk such tables purely in hardware. Consider the following sequence of operations:
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Computer Organization And Design The Hardware Software Interface
ISBN: 9780123747501
4th Revised Edition
Authors: David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy