Reduction of operational costs of virtual TLBs
US8694712B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Dec 5, 2006 |
| Grant date | Apr 8, 2014 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jul 10, 2029 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F12/1036
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
Various operations are disclosed for improving the operational efficiency of a virtual translation look-aside buffer (TLB) in a virtual machine environment. For example, operations are disclosed that allow for determination of whether present entries in shadow page tables (SPTs) are stale by comparing shadowed guest page table (GPT) entries against snapshots taken when the entries were cached. Other operations are disclosed that allow a virtual machine monitor (VMM) to access shadow page table trees (SPTTs) by walking trees in software or in hardware. Still other operations are disclosed allowing the VMM to use a hash table to relate GVA ranges to SPTs that map them, thus significantly reducing the cost of having to walk each SPTT in order to invalidate desired GVA(s). And, finally, operations are disclosed allowing the VMM to determine global GVA ranges by checking a bitmap, when invalidating global GVAs.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.