Find Out if Your Processor Support (Second Level Address Translation) SLAT [Tutorial]
36Find Out if Your Processor Support (Second Level Address Translation) SLAT [Tutorial]
Second Level Address Translation is a technology introduced in both Intel and AMD flavors of processors. Both companies call their version of the technology different names, Intel’s version is called EPT(Extended Page Tables) and AMD calls theirs RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing). Intel introduced Extended Page Tables in its processors that were built on the Nehalem architecture, while AMD only introduced RVI in their third generation of Opteron processors codenamed Barcelona. Hyper-V uses this to perform more VM memory management functions and reduce the overhead of translating guest physical addresses to real physical addresses. By doing this, Hypervisor CPU time is significantly reduced, and more memory is saved for each VM.
The processor has a Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) that supports virtual to physical memory address translation. A TLB is a cache on the processor that contains recently used mappings from the page table. When a virtual to physical address translation is required, the TLB checks it’s cache to determine whether or not it contains the mapping information. If the TLB contains a match, the physical memory address is provided and the data is access. If the TLB doesn’t contain a record, a page error occurs, and the Windows checks the page table for the mapping information. If Windows finds a mapping, it is written to the TLB, the address translation takes place, and then the data is accessed. Because of this buffer, the hypervisors overhead is substantially decreased.
This tutorial will apply for computers, laptops, desktops, and tablets running the Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems (Home, Professional, Enterprise, Education) from all supported hardware manufactures, like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, Alienware, Razer, MSI, Huawei , Microsoft Surface, and Samsung.