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 Post subject: SPT vs SLAT comparison
PostPosted: Wed Oct 20, 2021 1:53 am 
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Hi,

I would like to ask for clarification in the context of virtualization about the use cases for which Shadow Page Translation (SPT) might perform better than SLAT (i.e. Intel EPT/ AMD NPT).

I'm aware of in case of SPT there are actually two page table set in memory: the first one is the (original) Guest page table set while the second set (managed by VMM/Hypervisor) is actually the SPT pointed to by the CR3 register within the physical CPU.

In which use cases SPT could be preferable over SLAT ?

Thank you :wink:


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 Post subject: Re: SPT vs SLAT comparison
PostPosted: Wed Oct 20, 2021 6:36 am 
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In none.

Shadow paging is generally used in situations where full virtualization is not possible.

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 Post subject: Re: SPT vs SLAT comparison
PostPosted: Wed Oct 20, 2021 7:17 am 
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Korona wrote:
In none.
Shadow paging is generally used in situations where full virtualization is not possible.

What about a VM that uses only a 'restricted working set' ? Maybe in that case SPT could provide better performance since the 'reduced' number of page fault occurred (no 'tax' for the nested table walking required with SLAT)


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 Post subject: Re: SPT vs SLAT comparison
PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2021 12:30 pm 
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Well, if the guest doesn't change its page tables at all (or nearly at all), it might indeed be (very slightly) faster to not have a second translation layer.

In practice, all (or nearly all) interesting guests do need to change their PTs frequently.

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managarm: Microkernel-based OS capable of running a Wayland desktop (Discord: https://discord.gg/7WB6Ur3). My OS-dev projects: [mlibc: Portable C library for managarm, qword, Linux, Sigma, ...] [LAI: AML interpreter] [xbstrap: Build system for OS distributions].


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