second level address translation (hypervisor) (SLAT)

Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) is a technique to reduce overhead in hypervisor processors, improve virtual machine performance, and improve memory management of a hypervisor.

The SLAT technique adds another cache to the processor that stores the mapped addresses. This cache is called a translation lookaside buffer( TLB). During Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) from a virtual address to a physical address, the hypervisorchecks to see if there is a corresponding address mapping in the cache or if the processor needs to perform an address conversion. If the hypervisor does not find a corresponding entry, the hypervisor performs an address conversion and stores the translated address in the TLB buffer.