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OSTEP-notes-virtualization-chap19-to-24

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2023-03-24 / 0 评论 / 0 点赞 / 390 阅读 / 2,215 字

Paging: Faster Translations (TLBs)

When we want to make things fast, the OS usually needs some help. And help often comes from the OS’s old friend: the hardware.

The translation look-aside buffer, or TLB, is part of the chip’s memory-management unit (MMU), and is simply a hardware cache of popular virtual-to-physical address translations; thus, a better name would be an address-translation cache. Upon each virtual memory reference, the hardware first checks the TLB to see if the desired translation is held therein; if so, the translation is performed (quickly) without having to consult the page table (which has all translations).

Caching is one of the most fundamental performance techniques in computer systems, one that is used again and again to make the “common-case fast”. The idea behind hardware caches is to take advantage of locality in instruction and data references. There are usually two types of locality: temporal locality and spatial locality.

Who Handles The TLB Miss?

Two answers are possible: the hardware, or the software (OS).

In the olden days, the hardware had complex instruction sets (sometimes called CISC, for complex-instruction set computers) and the people who built the hardware didn’t much trust those sneaky OS people. On a miss, the hardware would “walk” the page table, find the correct page-table entry and extract the desired translation, update the TLB with the translation, and retry the instruction. An example of an “older” architecture that has hardware-managed TLBs is the Intel x86 architecture, which uses a fixed multi-level page table; the current page table is pointed to by the CR3 register.

More modern architectures, both RISC or reduced-instruction set computers, have what is known as a software-managed TLB. On a TLB miss, the hardware simply raises an exception, which pauses the current instruction stream, raises the privilege level to kernel mode, and jumps to a trap handler. As you might guess, this trap handler is code within the OS that is written with the express purpose of handling TLB misses. When run, the code will lookup the translation in the page table, use special “privileged” instructions to update the TLB, and return from the trap; at this point, the hardware retries the instruction.

TLB Contents: What’s In There?

A typical TLB might have 32, 64, or 128 entries and be what is called fully associative. Basically, this just means that any given translation can be anywhere in the TLB, and that the hardware will search the entire TLB in parallel to find the desired translation. A TLB entry might look like this:

VPN | PFN | other bits.

TLB Issue: Context Switches

One approach is to simply flush the TLB on context switches, thus emptying it before running the next process. The flush operation simply sets all valid bits to 0, essentially clearing the contents of the TLB.

If the OS switches between processes frequently, this cost may be high. To reduce this overhead, some systems add hardware support to enable sharing of the TLB across context switches.

In particular, some hardware systems provide an address space identifier (ASID) field in the TLB. You can think of the ASID as a process identifier (PID), but usually it has fewer bits (e.g., 8 bits for the ASID versus 32 bits for a PID).

Issue: Replacement Policy

when we are installing a new entry in the TLB, we have to replace an old one, and thus the question: which one to replace? One common approach is to evict the least-recently-used or LRU entry. Another typical approach is to use a random policy, which evicts a TLB mapping at random.

Paging: Smaller Tables

Hybrid Approach: Paging and Segments

When you have two good and seemingly opposing ideas, you should always see if you can combine them into a hybrid that manages to achieve the best of both worlds.

Multi-level Page Tables

The basic idea behind a multi-level page table is simple. First, chop up the page table into page-sized units; then, if an entire page of page-table entries (PTEs) is invalid, don’t allocate that page of the page table at all. To track whether a page of the page table is valid (and if valid, where it is in memory), use a new structure, called the page directory.

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multi-level table only allocates page-table space in proportion to the amount of address space you are using; thus it is generally compact and supports sparse address spaces.

It should be noted that there is a cost to multi-level tables; on a TLB miss, two loads from memory will be required to get the right translation information from the page table (one for the page directory, and one for the PTE itself), in contrast to just one load with a linear page table. Thus, the multi-level table is a small example of a time-space trade-off.

Before any of the complicated multi-level page table access occurs, the hardware first checks the TLB; upon a hit, the physical address is formed directly without accessing the page table at all, as before. Only upon a TLB miss does the hardware need to perform the full multi-level lookup. On this path, you can see the cost of our traditional two-level page table: two additional memory accesses to look up a valid translation.

Inverted Page Tables

An even more extreme space savings in the world of page tables is found with inverted page tables. Here, instead of having many page tables (one per process of the system), we keep a single page table that has an entry for each physical page of the system. The entry tells us which process is using this page, and which virtual page of that process maps to this physical page.

Beyond Physical Memory: Mechanisms

Swap Space

The first thing we will need to do is to reserve some space on the disk for moving pages back and forth. In operating systems, we generally refer to such space as swap space, because we swap pages out of memory to it and swap pages into memory from it.

The Present Bit

If the present bit is set to one, it means the page is present in physical memory and everything proceeds as above; if it is set to zero, the page is not in memory but rather on disk somewhere. The act of accessing a page that is not in physical memory is commonly referred to as a page fault.

Upon a page fault, the OS is invoked to service the page fault. A particular piece of code, known as a page-fault handler, runs, and must service the page fault, as we now describe.

The Page Fault

If a page is not present and has been swapped to disk, the OS will need to swap the page into memory in order to service the page fault. When the OS receives a page fault for a page, it looks in the PTE to find the address, and issues the request to disk to fetch the page into memory. When the disk I/O completes, the OS will then update the page table to mark the page as present, update the PFN field of the page-table entry (PTE) to record the in-memory location of the newly-fetched page, and retry the instruction.

Note that while the I/O is in flight, the process will be in the blocked state. Thus, the OS will be free to run other ready processes while the page fault is being serviced.

What If Memory Is Full?

memory may be full (or close to it). Thus, the OS might like to first page out one or more pages to make room for the new page(s) the OS is about to bring in. The process of picking a page to kick out, or replace is known as the page-replacement policy.

Page Fault Control Flow

Page-Fault Control Flow Algorithm (Hardware)

VPN = (VirtualAddress & VPN_MASK) >> SHIFT
(Success, TlbEntry) = TLB_Lookup(VPN)
if (Success == True) // TLB Hit
    if (CanAccess(TlbEntry.ProtectBits) == True)
        Offset = VirtualAddress & OFFSET_MASK
        PhysAddr = (TlbEntry.PFN << SHIFT) | Offset
        Register = AccessMemory(PhysAddr)
    else
        RaiseException(PROTECTION_FAULT)
else // TLB Miss
    PTEAddr = PTBR + (VPN * sizeof(PTE))
    PTE = AccessMemory(PTEAddr)
    if (PTE.Valid == False)
        RaiseException(SEGMENTATION_FAULT)
    else
        if (CanAccess(PTE.ProtectBits) == False)
            RaiseException(PROTECTION_FAULT)
        else if (PTE.Present == True)
            // assuming hardware-managed TLB
            TLB_Insert(VPN, PTE.PFN, PTE.ProtectBits)
            RetryInstruction()
        else if (PTE.Present == False)
            RaiseException(PAGE_FAULT)

Page-Fault Control Flow Algorithm (Software)

PFN = FindFreePhysicalPage()
if (PFN == -1) // no free page found
    PFN = EvictPage() // run replacement algorithm
DiskRead(PTE.DiskAddr, PFN) // sleep (waiting for I/O)
PTE.present = True // update page table with present bit
PTE.PFN = PFN // and translation (PFN)
RetryInstruction() // retry instruction

When Replacements Really Occur

There are many reasons for the OS to keep a small portion of memory free more proactively. To keep a small amount of memory free, most operating systems thus have some kind of high watermark (HW) and low watermark (LW) to help decide when to start evicting pages from memory.

How this works is as follows: when the OS notices that there are fewer than LW pages available, a background thread that is responsible for freeing memory runs. The thread evicts pages until there are HW pages available. The background thread, sometimes called the swap daemon or page daemon, then goes to sleep, happy that it has freed some memory for running processes and the OS to use.

By performing a number of replacements at once, new performance optimizations become possible. For example, many systems will cluster or group a number of pages and write them out at once to the swap partition, thus increasing the efficiency of the disk.

When you have some work to do, it is often a good idea to do it in the background to increase efficiency and to allow for grouping of operations.

Beyond Physical Memory: Policies

The Optimal Replacement Policy

Belady showed that a simple (but, unfortunately, difficult to implement!) approach that replaces the page that will be accessed furthest in the future is the optimal policy, resulting in the fewest-possible cache misses.

In the computer architecture world, architects sometimes find it useful to characterize misses by type, into one of three categories: compulsory, capacity, and conflict misses, sometimes called the Three C’s.

A compulsory miss (or cold-start miss) occurs because the cache is empty to begin with and this is the first reference to the item; in contrast, a capacity miss occurs because the cache ran out of space and had to evict an item to bring a new item into the cache. The third type of miss (a conflict miss) arises in hardware because of limits on where an item can be placed in a hardware cache, due to something known as set-associativity; it does not arise in the OS page cache because such caches are always fully-associative, i.e., there are no restrictions on where in memory a page can be placed.

A Simple Policy: FIFO

FIFO (first-in, first-out) replacement, where pages were simply placed in a queue when they enter the system; when a replacement occurs, the page on the tail of the queue (the “first-in” page) is evicted.

Another Simple Policy: Random

Another similar replacement policy is Random, which simply picks a random page to replace under memory pressure.

Using History: LRU

One type of historical information a page-replacement policy could use is frequency; if a page has been accessed many times, perhaps it should not be replaced as it clearly has some value. A more commonly used property of a page is its recency of access; the more recently a page has been accessed, perhaps the more likely it will be accessed again.

This family of policies is based on what people refer to as the principle of locality. The Least-Frequently-Used (LFU) policy replaces the least-frequently-used page when an eviction must take place. Similarly, the Least-Recently-Used (LRU) policy replaces the least-recently-used page.

Workload Examples

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截屏2023-03-24 22.26.03.png

Thrashing

What should the OS do when memory is simply oversubscribed, and the memory demands of the set of running processes simply exceeds the available physical memory? In this case, the system will constantly be paging, a condition sometimes referred to as thrashing.

Given a set of processes, a system could decide not to run a subset of processes, with the hope that the reduced set of processes’ working sets (the pages that they are using actively) fit in memory and thus can make progress. This approach, generally known as admission control, states that it is sometimes better to do less work well than to try to do everything at once poorly.

Some current systems take a more draconian approach to memory overload. For example, some versions of Linux run an out-of-memory killer when memory is oversubscribed; this daemon chooses a memory-intensive process and kills it, thus reducing memory in a none-too-subtle manner.

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