Translation Pass-Through for Near-Native Paging Performance in VMs

Explore a groundbreaking memory virtualization mechanism called Translation Pass-Through (TPT) in this conference talk from USENIX ATC '23. Discover how TPT achieves near-native performance for virtual machines (VMs) by enabling them to control virtual memory translation using one-dimensional page tables. Learn about the challenges of existing translation approaches and how TPT addresses them by exploiting new hardware support for physical memory tagging in commodity CPUs. Examine the implementation details of TPT in the KVM/QEMU hypervisor and enlightened Linux guest, and analyze performance estimates showing significant speedups over nested and shadow paging for real-world data center applications. Gain insights into the potential impact of this innovation on cloud computing efficiency and application performance in virtualized environments.