Revelator: Rapid Data Fetching via OS-Driven Hash-based Speculative Address Translation

TL;DR

Revelator is a hardware-OS cooperative scheme that uses hash-based address allocation and speculation to significantly reduce address translation latency in modern systems, improving performance and energy efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hash-based VA-to-PA mapping strategy combined with a lightweight speculation engine, enabling highly accurate speculative address translation with minimal hardware modifications.

Findings

Achieves 27% average speedup in native environments

Surpasses state-of-the-art by 5% in performance

Reduces energy consumption by 9%

Abstract

Address translation is a major performance bottleneck in modern computing systems. Speculative address translation can hide this latency by predicting the physical address (PA) of requested data early in the pipeline. However, predicting the PA from the virtual address (VA) is difficult due to the unpredictability of VA-to-PA mappings in conventional OSes. Prior works try to overcome this but face two key issues: (i) reliance on large pages or VA-to-PA contiguity, which is not guaranteed, and (ii) costly hardware changes to store speculation metadata with limited effectiveness. We introduce Revelator, a hardware-OS cooperative scheme enabling highly accurate speculative address translation with minimal modifications. Revelator employs a tiered hash-based allocation strategy in the OS to create predictable VA-to-PA mappings, falling back to conventional allocation when needed. On a TLB miss, a lightweight speculation engine, guided by this policy, generates candidate PAs for both program data and last-level page table entries (PTEs). Thus, Revelator (i) speculatively fetches requested data before translation resolves, reducing access latency, and (ii) fetches the fourth-level PTE before the third-level PTE is accessed, accelerating page table walks. We prototype Revelator's OS support in Linux and evaluate it in simulation across 11 diverse, data-intensive benchmarks in native and virtualized environments. Revelator achieves average speedups of 27% (20%) in native (virtualized) settings, surpasses a state-of-the-art speculative mechanism by 5%, and reduces energy use by 9% compared to baseline. Our RTL prototype shows minimal area and power overheads on a modern CPU.