Performance Comparison between Hardware & Software Cache Partitioning Techniques

JiWoong Park, HeonYoung Yeom, Hyeonsang Eom

http://doi.org/

The era of multi-core processors has begun since the limit of the clock speed has been reached. These days, multi-core technology is used not only in desktops, servers, and table PCs, but also in smartphones. In this architecture, there is always interference between processes, because of the sharing of system resources. To address this problem, cache partitioning is used, which can be roughly divided into two types: software and hardware cache partitioning. When it comes to dynamic cache partitioning, hardware cache partitioning is superior to software cache partitioning, because it needs no page copy. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of hardware and software cache partitioning on the AMD Opteron 6282 SE, which is the only commodity processor providing hardware cache partitioning, to see whether this technique can be effectively deployed in dynamic environments.