Abstract: The present invention provides a software-assisted hardware TLB miss-handler which is designed to reduce the TLB miss penalty while being low cost to implement and requiring little chip area or complexity. When a TLB miss occurs, the HW TLB miss handler of the present invention computes a physical address of a page table entry located in a special hardware-visible table based on a missing virtual address. It accesses the page table entry and checks for a correct translation and status information. If correct, a physical page address and protection information of the page table entry are inserted into the TLB. The original virtual address is re-translated and normal program execution continues. If the correct translation and status are not found, the HW TLB miss-handler will not insert the entry and will trap to a more sophisticated SW TLB miss handler. A pointer to the page table entry is passed to the SW TLB miss handler so that the page table address need not be recomputed.

Abstract: The present invention provides a software-assisted hardware TLB miss-handler which is designed to reduce the TLB miss penalty while being low cost to implement and requiring little chip area or complexity. When a TLB miss occurs, the HW TLB miss handler of the present invention computes a physical address of a page table entry located in a special hardware-visible table based on a missing virtual address. It accesses the page table entry and checks for a correct translation and status information. If correct, a physical page address and protection information of the page table entry are inserted into the TLB. The original virtual address is re-translated and normal program execution continues. If the correct translation and status are not found, the HW TLB miss-handler will not insert the entry and will trap to a more sophisticated SW TLB miss handler. A pointer to the page table entry is passed to the SW TLB miss handler so that the page table address need not be recomputed.