Method and system for reducing the amount of time and computing resources required to perform a hardware table walk

摘要

A computer system and a method are provided that reduce the amount of time and computing resources that are required to perform a hardware table walk (HWTW) in the event that a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) miss occurs. If a TLB miss occurs when performing a stage 2 (S2) HWTW to find the PA at which a stage 1 (S1) page table is stored, the MMU uses the IPA to predict the corresponding PA, thereby avoiding the need to perform any of the S2 table lookups. This greatly reduces the number of lookups that need to be performed when performing these types of HWTW read transactions, which greatly reduces processing overhead and performance penalties associated with performing these types of transactions.