Decoupling Translation Lookaside Buffer Coherence from Cache Coherence - Archive ouverte HAL
Conference Papers Year : 2017

Decoupling Translation Lookaside Buffer Coherence from Cache Coherence

Abstract

Many multicore and manycore architectures support hardware cache coherence. However, most of them rely on software techniques to maintain Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) coherence, namely the TLB shootdown routine, which is a costly procedure, known to be hardly scalable. The TSAR architecture is a manycore architecture including hardware TLB coherence, but in which the TLB coherence mechanism is tightly coupled to the cache coherence protocol, resulting in useless TLB invalidations. We propose to improve this existing TLB coherence scheme by adding a hardware module which allows separating data from metadata for cache lines containing address translation. This allows to eliminate the need to invalidate TLB entries when a line containing a translation is evicted from the L1 cache. Our solution does not modify the cache coherence protocol, does not increase the critical path in the L1 cache, and even results in little memory savings. Performance results show that our solution allows to eliminate from 90% to 95% of TLB scans operations, and from 50% to 80% of TLB flushes. This in turn results in an overall performance improvement of 5% to 20% of execution times on a 16-core architecture.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
Liu2017Decoupling.pdf (263.43 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01585880 , version 1 (12-09-2017)

Identifiers

Cite

Hao Liu, Quentin L. Meunier, Alain Greiner. Decoupling Translation Lookaside Buffer Coherence from Cache Coherence. IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI 2017), Jul 2017, Bochum, Germany. pp.92 - 97, ⟨10.1109/ISVLSI.2017.25⟩. ⟨hal-01585880⟩
568 View
485 Download

Altmetric

Share

More