What is the primary function of a TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer)?
The Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) is a small, fast, hardware-managed cache. Its sole purpose is to store recent mappings of virtual page addresses to physical frame addresses (page table entries). Since address translation is required for almost every memory access in a virtual memory system, the TLB dramatically speeds up the process by avoiding a slow main memory lookup for the page table on a hit.
