The Semantic Foundations and a Landscape of Cache-Persistence Analyses

Abstract

We clarify the notion of cache persistence and contribute to the understanding of persistence analysis for caches with least-recently-used replacement. To this end, we provide the first formal definition of persistence as a property of a trace semantics. Based on this trace semantics we introduce a semantics-based, i.e., abstract-interpretation-based persistence analysis framework. We identify four basic persistence analyses and prove their correctness as instances of this analysis framework. Combining these basic persistence analyses via two generic cooperation mechanisms yields a lattice of ten persistence analyses. Notably, this lattice contains all persistence analyses previously described in the literature. As a consequence, we obtain uniform correctness proofs for all prior analyses and a precise understanding of how and why these analyses work, as well as how they relate to each other in terms of precision.