A simplified TDP with large tables

Abstract

Among the performance bottlenecks for the virtual machine, memory comes next to the I/O as the second major source of overhead to be addressed. While the SPT and TDP have proved to be quite effective and mature solutions in memory virtualization, it is not yet guaranteed that they perform equally well for arbitrary kind of workloads, especially considering that the performance of HPC workloads is more sensitive to the virtual than to the native execution environment. We propose that based on the current TDP design, modification could be made to reduce the 2D page table walk with the help of large page table. By doing this, not only the guest and host context switching due to guest page fault could be avoided, but also the second dimension of paging could be potentially simplified, which will lead to better performance.