Review Board 2.0.15


config, mem: new L2 cache architectures for the classic memory system

Review Request #3506 - Created June 17, 2016 and updated

Information
Rodrigo Cataldo
gem5
3495
Reviewers
Default

Create four new L2 types of cache architectures for the classic memory system.
The classic memory system has one option for L2 cache architecture: a single shared L2 cache.
This patch allows the designer to employ four new types:

  1. A shared instruction and data L2 cache.
  2. Private L2 caches (one per core).
  3. Private instruction and data L2 caches (two per core).
  4. Paired L2 cache (user-defined number of L2 caches per cluster of core).

Additional command-options were created to control the latency and MSHR queue size of such caches.
In addition, this patch does not influence existing simulations -- see the testing section for more details.

All systems were tested using the ARM ISA and the canneal benchmark (from PARSEC) using the simmedium input set.
All new command-options were tested.

The result prefixed with the string "vanilla" is a simulation without the patch. This shows that the patch does not change the statistics of the system for the --l2cache scenario (only the number of executed instructions on the host are changed due to the patches).

results: http://tinyurl.com/l2-caches-gem5