Intel Corporation
MITIGATING POOLED MEMORY CACHE MISS LATENCY WITH CACHE MISS FAULTS AND TRANSACTION ABORTS

Abstract:

Methods and apparatus for mitigating pooled memory cache miss latency with cache miss faults and transaction aborts. A compute platform coupled to one or more tiers of memory, such as remote pooled memory in a disaggregated environment executes memory transactions to access objects that are stored in the one or more tiers. A determination is made to whether a copy of the object is in a local cache on the platform; if it is, the object is accessed from the local cache. If the object is not in the local cache, a transaction abort may be generated if enabled for the transactions. Optionally, a cache miss page fault is generated if the object is in a cacheable region of a memory tier, and the transaction abort is not enabled. Various mechanisms are provided to determine what to do in response to a cache miss page fault, such as determining addresses for cache lines to prefetch from a memory tier storing the object(s), determining how much data to prefetch, and determining whether to perform a bulk transfer.