On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 04:48:21PM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> > I know of one machine where changing the size of the cacheline is supposed
> > not to work, that's the MIPS Magnum 4000 and it's close relatives.
>
> Hmm, why -- is such a change observable externally in any way? Of
> course you can't switch the other way if the s-cache uses a line width of
> 16 bytes. Maybe that's the case with the Magnum?
It's a hardware problem with the memory controller I was told by one of
it's developpers. That forced them to run the machine with an different
line size for D-cache and I-Cache. There's various revs of the Magnum's
memory controller and only one of them got all the cases right ...
Maybe DECstation and other SGI hardware got that better?
> > Anyway, I put the check there for the unlikely case there are broken
> > systems out there. In practice I assume vendors were aware of this
> > problem and the check is purely theoretical and for paranoid correctness's
> > sake.
>
> Still V3.0 should be taken into account.
Ok.
> > It seems like changing the configuration to larger cache lines where
> > possible should improve performance somewhat. If all the cache code is
>
> Why? It isn't that obvious especially as a p-cache miss costs a single
> cycle only.
During my recent work on the cache code I found the execution time of
cache flushing code to be quite a bit higher than previously assumed so
larger lines would help reducing that also.
> > working truly correct we also should no longer see VCE exceptions on
> > R4000SC processors - the reason why Indys are still a valuable test tool.
>
> As are DECstations which use the opposite endianness -- so you can test
> code both ways.
A bunch of evaluation boards that support running in the other endianess
and way exceed the performance of any R4000-based platform. Just having
to flip a switch on the board is very handy.
Ralf
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