A multiprocessor system (20, 102, 110) uses multiple operating systems or a single operating system uses &mgr;TLBs (36) and a shared TLB subsystem (48) to provide efficient and flexible translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses. Upon misses in the &mgr;TLB and shared TLB, access to a translation table in external memory (54) can be made using either a hardware mechanism (100) or a software function. The translation can be flexibly based on a number of criteria, such as a resource identifier and a task identifier. Slave processors, such as coprocessors (34) and DMA processors (24) can access the shared TLB 48 without master processor interaction for more efficient operation.