Invalidating translation lookaside buffer entries in a virtual machine system

An apparatus comprising:

• a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in a processor having a plurality of TLB entries, each TLB entry being associated with a virtual machine extension (VMX) tag word indicating if the associated TLB entry is invalidated according to the processor mode when an invalidation operation is performed, the processor mode being one of execution in a virtual machine (VM) and execution not in a virtual machine, the invalidation operation belonging to a non-empty set of invalidation operations composed of a union of (1) a possibly empty set of operations that invalidate a variable number of TLB entries, (2) a possibly empty set of operations that invalidate exactly one TLB entry, (3) a possibly empty set of operations that invalidate the plurality of TLB entries, (4) a possibly empty set of operations that enable and disable use of virtual memory, and (5) a possibly empty set of operations that configure physical address size, page size or other virtual memory system behavior in a manner that changes the manner in which a physical machine interprets the TLB entries;
• wherein the invalidation operations include IA-32-specific operations (a) IA-32 task switches involving changes of virtual memory related control registers, or (b) loading of control registers that modify IA-32-specific page size extension (PSE) and physical address extension (PAE).