Trident: Harnessing Architectural Resources for All Page Sizes in x86 Processors

Intel and AMD processors have long supported more than one large page sizes – 1GB and 2MB, to reduce address translation overheads for applications with large memory footprints. However, previous works on large pages have primarily focused on 2MB pages, partly due to a lack of evidence on the usefulness of 1GB pages to real-world applications. Consequently, micro-architectural resources devoted to 1GB pages have gone underutilized for a decade.

We quantitatively demonstrate where 1GB pages can be valuable, especially when employed in conjunction with 2MB pages. Unfortunately, the lack of application-transparent dynamic allocation of 1GB pages is to blame for the under-utilization of 1GB pages on today’s systems. Toward this, we design and implement Trident in Linux to fully harness micro-architectural resources devoted for all page sizes in the current x86 hardware by transparently allocating 1GB, 2MB, and 4KB pages as suitable at runtime. Trident speeds up eight memory-intensive applications by 18%, on average, over Linux’s use of 2MB pages. We then propose Tridentpv, an extension to Trident that virtualizes 1GB pages via copy-less promotion and compaction in the guest OS. Overall, this paper shows that adequate software enablement brings practical relevance to even GB-sized pages, and motivates micro-architects to continue enhancing hardware support for all large page sizes.