Re: [Qemu-devel] ideas for improving TLB performance (help with TCG backend wanted)

[Peter Maydell]

On 19 September 2018 at 17:19, Alex Bennée <address@hidden> wrote:
>> An additional improvement that I have thought of is to get rid
>> of memset(-1) altogether. Instead, we'd store addresses in the TLB
>> as $real_address+1, so that 0xff..ff is stored as 0x00..00. That way,
>> instead of malloc+memset we'd just calloc a new TLB, which
>> should be much faster since we'd most likely get zeroed pages
>> from mmap. The cost would be an additional instruction in the fast
>> path to subtract 1 from the address in the TLB, but this extra
>> instruction would be essentially free in modern CPUs.
>
> Or test for 0 - I'm guessing pretty much any null page access could be
> an always slow path as it's likely to be a fault.

Not true for instance for M profile CPUs, where page 0 likely
contains the interrupt vector table.

thanks
-- PMM