Recency-based TLB preloading

Abstract

Caching and other latency tolerating techniques have been quite successful in maintaining high memory system performance for general purpose processors. However, TLB misses have become a serious bottleneck as working sets are growing beyond the capacity of TLBs. This work presents one of the first attempts to hide TLB miss latency by using preloading techniques. We present results for traditional next-page TLB miss preloading - an approach shown to cut some of the misses. However, a key contribution of this work is a novel TLB miss prediction algorithm based on the concept of “recency”, and we show that it can predict over 55% of the TLB misses for the five commercial applications considered.