Agile Paging for Efficient Memory Virtualization

Virtualization provides benefits for many workloads, but the overheads of virtualizing memory are still high. The cost comes from managing two levels of address translation--one in the guest virtual machine (VM) and the other in the host virtual machine monitor (VMM)--with either nested or shadow paging. This article introduces agile paging, which combines the best of both nested and shadow paging within a page walk and exceeds the performance of both techniques.