Reducing last level cache pollution through OS-level software-controlled region-based partitioning
Tao Huang, Qi Zhong, Xuetao Guan, Xiaoyin Wang, Xu Cheng, Keyi Wang · 2012
Performance degradation caused by cache pollution in the last level cache is extremely severe. In this paper, we propose a software controlled mechanism for last level cache partitioning at the region level in order to reduce intra-application last level cache misses due to cache pollution. A profiling feedback mechanism is used to analyze the inter-region cache interference. Guided by the profiling information, we enhance operating system support for mapping poor locality regions to a small slice in the last level cache in order to eliminate the harmful effect of non-reusable data. Our approach does not require any hardware support or new instructions, and is also application transparent.