1. Give an example in the miss rate table where higher set associativity actually increases miss rate. Construct a cache configuration and reference stream to demonstrate this.

2. To support multiple virtual machines, two levels of memory virtualization are needed. Each virtual machine still controls the mapping of virtual address (VA) to physical address (PA), while the hypervisor maps the physical address (PA) of each virtual machine to the actual machine address (MA). To accelerate such mappings, a software approach called “shadow paging” duplicates each virtual machine’s page tables in the hypervisor, and intercepts VA to PA mapping changes to keep both copies consistent. To remove the complexity of shadow page tables, a hardware approach called nested page table (NPT) explicitly supports two classes of page tables (VA⇒PA and PA⇒MA) and can walk such tables purely in hardware.

Consider the following sequence of operations: (1) Create process; (2) TLB miss; (3) page fault; (4) context switch;