Transparent OS support for variable translation sizes

The address translation (AT) overhead has been widely studied in literature and the new 5-level paging is expected to make translation even costlier. Multiple solutions have been proposed to alleviate the issue either by reducing the number of TLB misses or by reducing their overhead. The solution widely adopted by industry involves extending the page sizes supported by the hardware and software, with the most common being 2MB and 1GB. In this work, we evaluate the usefulness of intermediate translation sizes, using memory-intensive work-loads running on an ARMv8-A server.