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A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a cache that memory management hardware uses to improve virtual address translation speed. The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors includes one or more TLBs in the memory management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any hardware 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 requires a lot of time 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. ==Overview== A translation lookaside buffer (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. 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 hybrid thereof, 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. A common optimization for physically addressed caches is to perform the TLB lookup in parallel with the cache access. The low-order bits of any virtual address (e.g., in a virtual memory system having 4 KB pages, the lower 12 bits of the virtual address) represent the offset of the desired address within the page, and thus they do not change in the virtual-to-physical translation. During a cache access, two steps are performed: an index is used to find an entry in the cache's data store, and then the tags for the cache line found are compared. If the cache is structured in such a way that it can be indexed using only the bits that do not change in translation, the cache can perform its "index" operation while the TLB translates the upper bits of the address. Then, the translated address from the TLB is passed to the cache. The cache performs a tag comparison to determine if this access was a hit or miss. It is possible to perform the TLB lookup in parallel with the cache access even if the cache must be indexed using some bits that may change upon address translation; see the address translation section in the cache article for more details about virtual addressing as it pertains to caches and TLBs. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Translation lookaside buffer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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