Translation lookaside buffer

A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory cache that is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. It is a part of the chip’s memory-management unit (MMU). The TLB stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory and can be called an address-translation cache. A TLB may reside between the CPU and the CPU cache, between CPU cache and the main memory or between the different levels of the multi-level cache. The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors include one or more TLBs in the memory-management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any processor that utilizes paged or segmented virtual memory. A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory cache that is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. It is a part of the chip’s memory-management unit (MMU). The TLB stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory and can be called an address-translation cache. A TLB may reside between the CPU and the CPU cache, between CPU cache and the main memory or between the different levels of the multi-level cache. The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors include one or more TLBs in the memory-management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any processor that utilizes paged or segmented virtual memory. The TLB is sometimes implemented as content-addressable memory (CAM). The CAM search key is the virtual address, and the search result is a physical address. If the requested address is present in the TLB, the CAM search yields a match quickly and the retrieved physical address can be used to access memory. This is called a TLB hit. If the requested address is not in the TLB, it is a miss, and the translation proceeds by looking up the page table in a process called a page walk. The page walk is time-consuming when compared to the processor speed, as it involves reading the contents of multiple memory locations and using them to compute the physical address. After the physical address is determined by the page walk, the virtual address to physical address mapping is entered into the TLB. The PowerPC 604, for example, has a two-way set-associative TLB for data loads and stores. Some processors have different instruction and data address TLBs. A TLB has a fixed number of slots containing page-table entries and segment-table entries; page-table entries map virtual addresses to physical addresses and intermediate-table addresses, while segment-table entries map virtual addresses to segment addresses, intermediate-table addresses and page-table addresses. The virtual memory is the memory space as seen from a process; this space is often split into pages of a fixed size (in paged memory), or less commonly into segments of variable sizes (in segmented memory). The page table, generally stored in main memory, keeps track of where the virtual pages are stored in the physical memory. This method uses two memory accesses (one for the page-table entry, one for the byte) to access a byte. First, the page table is looked up for the frame number. Second, the frame number with the page offset gives the actual address. Thus any straightforward virtual memory scheme would have the effect of doubling the memory access time. Hence, the TLB is used to reduce the time taken to access the memory locations in the page-table method. The TLB is a cache of the page table, representing only a subset of the page-table contents. Referencing the physical memory addresses, a TLB may reside between the CPU and the CPU cache, between the CPU cache and primary storage memory, or between levels of a multi-level cache. The placement determines whether the cache uses physical or virtual addressing. If the cache is virtually addressed, requests are sent directly from the CPU to the cache, and the TLB is accessed only on a cache miss. If the cache is physically addressed, the CPU does a TLB lookup on every memory operation, and the resulting physical address is sent to the cache. In a Harvard architecture or modified Harvard architecture, a separate virtual address space or memory-access hardware may exist for instructions and data. This can lead to distinct TLBs for each access type, an instruction translation lookaside buffer (ITLB) and a data translation lookaside buffer (DTLB). Various benefits have been demonstrated with separate data and instruction TLBs.