Performance Implications of Extended Page Tables on Virtualized x86 Processors

Abstract

Managing virtual memory is an expensive operation, and becomes even more expensive on virtualized servers. Process- ing TLB misses on a virtualized x86 server requires a two-dimensional page walk that can have 6x more page table lookups, hence 6x more memory references, than a native page table walk. Thus much of the recent research on the subject starts from the assumption that TLB miss processing in virtual environments is significantly more expensive than on native servers. However, we will show that with the latest software stack on modern x86 processors, most of these page-table lookups are satisfied by internal paging structure caches and the L1/L2 data caches, and the actual virtualization overhead of TLB miss processing is a modest fraction of the overall time spent processing TLB misses.