PTAT: An efficient and precise tool for collecting detailed TLB miss traces

Abstract

It is well known that the TLB performance impacts the memory system performance, which is critical for overall system performance. Similar to multi-level caches, multilevel TLBs have become an important leverage for boosting data access performance. Applications have increasingly large working sets. Servers targeting such applications have thus been built with ever larger main memory capacities, but there has been no commensurate growth in TLB sizes. Designing high performance and energy efficient memory hierarchies require insight into the behavior of current designs: when do they work well, and when do they fall short of expectations. Profiling the TLB misses is the prerequisite for memory system optimization. Both designing efficient TLB architecture and TLB-friendly applications require analysis of TLB miss behavior. Although researchers have extensively studied TLB behavior, current approaches have some issues in either efficiency or precision.