| 摘要 |
A method and apparatus to enable programmatic control of cache line eviction policies. A mechanism is provided that enables programmers to mark portions of code with different cache priority levels based on anticipated or measured access patterns for those code portions. Corresponding cues to assist in effecting the cache eviction policies associated with given priority levels are embedded in machine code generated from source- and/or assembly-level code. Cache architectures are provided that partition cache space into multiple pools, each pool being assigned a different priority. In response to execution of a memory access instruction, an appropriate cache pool is selected and searched based on information contained in the instruction's cue. On a cache miss, a cache line is selected from that pool to be evicted using a cache eviction policy associated with the pool. Implementations of the mechanism or described for both n-way set associative caches and fully-associative caches.
|
