Hardware

Digital Design & Computer Architecture - Lecture 26a: Virtual Memory II (Spring 2022)

Onur Mutlu Lectures
Onur Mutlu Lectures•Feb 19, 2026

Why It Matters

These design choices directly affect system performance, memory-efficiency and security—impacting OS behavior, application latency, and hardware-software trade-offs in modern servers and processors.

Summary

The lecture expands on virtual memory implementation details, focusing on page-table size and storage using multi-level page tables, x86-64’s 64-bit page-table entries, and support for multiple page sizes (4KB, 2MB, 1GB). It reviews control registers (e.g., CR3), context-switch implications for page-table base registers, and the security risks if hardware fails to load them. The class also distinguishes TLB misses from page faults, discusses who manages TLB miss handling (hardware vs. software) and cooperative software-driven page-fault handling, and outlines trade-offs in replacement and coherence. Real-system complexity and performance tradeoffs from multi-level paging and TLB management are emphasized throughout.

Original Description

Digital Design and Computer Architecture, ETH Zürich, Spring 2022 (https://safari.ethz.ch/digitaltechnik/spring2022/)
Lecture 26a: Virtual Memory II
Lecturer: Professor Onur Mutlu (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/)
Date: June 3, 2022
Recommended Reading:
====================
A Modern Primer on Processing in Memory
Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Computing Systems
RowHammer: A Retrospective
Fundamentally Understanding and Solving RowHammer
RECOMMENDED LECTURE VIDEOS & PLAYLISTS:
========================================
Computer Architecture Fall 2021 Lectures Playlist:
Digital Design and Computer Architecture Spring 2021 Livestream Lectures Playlist:
Featured Lectures:
Interview with Professor Onur Mutlu:
The Story of RowHammer Lecture:
Accelerating Genome Analysis Lecture:
Memory-Centric Computing Systems Tutorial at IEDM 2021:
Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines Lecture:
Computer Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures Playlist:
Digital Design and Computer Architecture Spring 2020 Lectures Playlist:
Public Lectures by Onur Mutlu, Playlist:
Computer Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Spring 2015 Lectures Playlist:
Rethinking Memory System Design Lecture @stanfordonline :

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