An efficient instruction cache scheme for object-oriented languages

We present an efficient cache scheme, which can considerably reduce instruction cache misses caused by procedure call/returns. This scheme employs N-way banks and XOR mapping functions. The main function of this scheme is to place a group of instructions separated by a call instruction into a bank according to the initial and final bank selection mechanisms. After the initial bank selection mechanism selects a bank on an instruction cache miss, the final bank selection mechanism will determine the final bank for updating a cache line as a correction mechanism. These two mechanisms can guarantee that recent groups of instructions exist in each bank safely. We have developed a simulation program by using Shade and Spixtools, provided by SUN Microsystems, on an ultra SPARC/10 processor. Our experimental results show that these schemes reduce conflict misses more effectively than skewed-associative caches in both C (up to 9.29% improvement) and C++ (up to 30.71% improvement) programs on L1 caches. In addition, they also allow for a significant miss reduction on Branch Target Buffers (BTB)

Randomized Caches Can Be Pretty Useful to Hard Real-Time Systems

Cache randomization per se, and its viability for probabilistic timing analysis (PTA) of critical real-time systems, are receiving increasingly close attention from the scientific community and the industrial practitioners. In fact, the very notion of introducing randomness and probabilities in time-critical systems has caused strenuous debates owing to the apparent clash that this idea has with the strictly deterministic view traditionally held for those systems. A paper recently appeared in LITES (Reineke, J. (2014). Randomized Caches Considered Harmful in Hard Real-Time Systems. LITES, 1(1), 03:1-03:13.) provides a critical analysis of the weaknesses and risks entailed in using randomized caches in hard real-time systems. In order to provide the interested reader with a fuller, balanced appreciation of the subject matter, a critical analysis of the benefits brought about by that innovation should be provided also. This short paper addresses that need by revisiting the array of issues addressed in the cited work, in the light of the latest advances to the relevant state of the art. Accordingly, we show that the potential benefits of randomized caches do offset their limitations, causing them to be - when used in conjunction with PTA - a serious competitor to conventional designs

Software trace cache

We explore the use of compiler optimizations, which optimize the layout of instructions in memory. The target is to enable the code to make better use of the underlying hardware resources regardless of the specific details of the processor/architecture in order to increase fetch performance. The Software Trace Cache (STC) is a code layout algorithm with a broader target than previous layout optimizations. We target not only an improvement in the instruction cache hit rate, but also an increase in the effective fetch width of the fetch engine. The STC algorithm organizes basic blocks into chains trying to make sequentially executed basic blocks reside in consecutive memory positions, then maps the basic block chains in memory to minimize conflict misses in the important sections of the program. We evaluate and analyze in detail the impact of the STC, and code layout optimizations in general, on the three main aspects of fetch performance; the instruction cache hit rate, the effective fetch width, and the branch prediction accuracy. Our results show that layout optimized, codes have some special characteristics that make them more amenable for high-performance instruction fetch. They have a very high rate of not-taken branches and execute long chains of sequential instructions; also, they make very effective use of instruction cache lines, mapping only useful instructions which will execute close in time, increasing both spatial and temporal locality.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version