Experiment on usefuleness of cache coloring on ia32

Kanoj Sarcar (kanoj@google.engr.sgi.com)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 12:18:32 -0700 (PDT)

In an attempt to characterize the effects of cache coloring in
the os for a modern Intel processor, I spent a couple of days
hacking the Linux kernel and experimenting with a toy program.
The kernel patch does a gross type of colored allocation by
grabbing pages from the free list until it gets one of the right
color - the intent is not to study the os overheads of doing
colored allocations, rather the benefits a program might see from
using pages allocated in such fashion. My findings are at

http://reality.sgi.com/kanoj_engr/ccdis.html

and it has at least one unexplained observation. If you are
interested in this sort of thing, please browse it and send me
comments about how I can improve the study. Pointers to apps which
are suspected to benefit from cache coloring would also help.

Thanks.

Kanoj
kanoj@engr.sgi.com

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