What is TLB shootdown?

caching operating-system tlb smp
mousey picture mousey · Sep 20, 2010 · Viewed 28.9k times · Source

What is a TLB shootdown in SMPs?

I am unable to find much information regarding this concept. Any good example would be very much appreciated.

Answer

Gabe picture Gabe · Sep 20, 2010

A TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) is a cache of the translations from virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses. When a processor changes the virtual-to-physical mapping of an address, it needs to tell the other processors to invalidate that mapping in their caches.

That process is called a "TLB shootdown".

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