Abstract
The conventional private translation lookaside buffer (TLB) design in a multiprocessor system may create the TLB consistency problem. One way to avoid the problem is to use shared TLBs. In this paper, we will discuss a design for shared TLBs for shared-memory multiprocessors. The performance of the proposed shared TLB design is evaluated using the trace-driven technique. The traces are collected from general-purpose applications. Results from the simulation show that the shared TLB approach, in general, has a lower TLB miss ratio than does the private TLB solution. For example, using a 4-way set-associative TLB and keeping the total size of TLBs fixed, the miss ratios using shared TLBs of size 64×n pages, where n is the number of processors in the system, are 4%, 14%, and 37% lower than the miss ratios using private TLBs in a 2-, 4-, and 8-processor system, respectively. The results also indicate that the shared TLB design can achieve roughly the same miss ratio by using about half the total size of private TLBs.