Address translation for VMs with large working sets is expensive: nested paging pays a worst-case cost that grows with page-table depth, while shadow and paravirtualized paging incur heavy hypervisor intervention on every guest page-table update. Translation Pass-Through lets a VM directly control guest-virtual to host-physical translation through one-dimensional page tables, while the host enforces inter-VM isolation using new commodity-CPU support for physical-memory tagging. Prototyped in KVM/QEMU with an enlightened Linux guest, TPT reaches native performance on real data-center applications — up to 2.4× faster than nested and 1.4× faster than shadow paging.

Published at USENIX ATC 2023.