U-cache: A cost-effective solution to the virtual cache synonym problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a cost-effective solution to the virtual cache synonym problem. In the proposed solution, a minimal hardware addition guarantees correct handling of the synonym problem whereas a simple modification to the virtual-to-physical address mapping in the operating system optimizes the performance. The key to the proposed solution is a small, physically-indexed cache called a U-cache. The U-cache maintains the reverse translation information of cache blocks that belong to unaligned virtual pages, where unaligned means that the lower bits of the virtual page number that are used to index the virtual cache do not match those of the corresponding physical page number. The biggest advantage of the U-cache approach is that it leaves room for software optimization in the form of mapping alignment. Performance evaluation based on memory reference traces from a real system shows that the U-cache, with only a few entries, performs almost as well as (in some cases outperforms) a fully-configured hardware-based solution when more than 95% of mappings are aligned.