Hi Abishek, Timon is right. In gem5 the caches implement a write-back policy. When there is an eviction of a dirty block from L1 then it will be written back to L2. In rare exceptions where allocation is not possible in the L2 (e.g., there is a pending request for the victim block), the writeback will be sent to the memory below.
As for your first question and as Timon pointed out, if you have a request for block X which misses in the L1 it will send a request to the memory below and it will allocate an MSHR while it is waiting for the response. If the cache receives another request for the same block X before the response comes back and if the two requests can be serviced together (e.g., both read from X) the cache will coalesce the second request with the first and will service both of them at once when the response arrives to L1. Nikos From: gem5-users <[email protected]> on behalf of Timon Evenblij <[email protected]> Reply-To: gem5 users mailing list <[email protected]> Date: Monday, 6 August 2018 at 06:56 To: gem5 users mailing list <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [gem5-users] Cache Management Hi Abishek, Everything is possible, it all depends on the cache policy. I think the default behavior in gem5 is a write-back cache, and I am not sure if any other policies are implemented (Can someone else confirm?). A write-back cache only writes the data back upon eviction, unlike a write-trough cache were all levels are updated at write time. So, for your example: if both L1 and L2 are write-back caches, then the block in L2 gets updated after eviction from L1. Only later, when the block gets evicted from L2, then the content is written in main-memory. Best regards On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 3:59 PM Abhishek Singh <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Timon, I had one question eviction of write back. What happens when a dirty block is evicted from L1 cache. Does it check L2 cache updates the content of that block in L2 and then goes to memory and update contents in memory ? On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 4:04 AM Timon Evenblij <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Abishek, No, for this case, MSHRs (miss status handling registers) exists. These are registers that keep track of missed cache accesses (in your case packet 1 that misses in L1), so the cache can be freed to reply to other accesses (packet 2) while waiting for the answer of the miss (packet 1 gets answered from L2 or even further away). Best regards, Timon On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 2:30 AM Abhishek Singh <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: My question is simple if there are two packets wants to access L1 cache in a system of 2 level cache and cpu is o3. Will packet 2 has to wait for packet 1 to get its response(packet 1) from L2 in case of L1 cache miss and L2 cache hit? What happen if its L2 miss? _______________________________________________ gem5-users mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://m5sim.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gem5-users _______________________________________________ gem5-users mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://m5sim.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gem5-users _______________________________________________ gem5-users mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://m5sim.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gem5-users IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Thank you.
_______________________________________________ gem5-users mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gem5-users
