| 摘要 |
The present invention provides a cache manager (CM) for use with an address translation table (ATT) which take advantage of way information, available when a cache line is first cached, for efficiently accessing a multi-way cache of a computer system having a main memory and one or more processors. The main memory and the ATT are page-oriented while the cache is organized using cache lines. The cache includes a plurality of cache lines divided into a number of segments corresponding to the number of "ways". Each cache line includes an address tag (AT) field and a data field. The way information is stored in the ATT for later cache access. In this implementation, "waylets" provide an efficiency mechanism for storing the way information whenever a cache line is cached. Accordingly, each table entry of the ATT includes a virtual address (VA) field, a physical address (PA) field, and a plurality of waylets associated with each pair of VA and PA fields. Subsequently, the waylets can be used to quickly index directly into a single segment of the cache as follows. Upon receiving a virtual address of a target cache line, the CM attempts to match a virtual address field of one of the ATT entries with a page index portion of the virtual address. If there is a match, a waylet of the ATT entry is retrieved using a page offset portion of the virtual address. If the waylet value is valid, the CM indexes directly into a single cache line using the waylet value, the physical address field of the ATT entry and the page offset portion of the virtual address. If the AT field of the retrieved cache line matches with a portion of the physical address field of the ATT entry, the processor retrieves the data field of the cache line using the page offset portion of the VA. If the AT field does not match, the target cache line is retrieved from the main memory, and the waylet value in both the ATT and the main memory updated. <IMAGE> |
