Patent attributes
Described herein is a method for tracking changes to memory locations made by an application. In one embodiment, the application decides to start tracking and sends a list of virtual memory pages to be tracked to an operating system via an interface. The operating system converts the list of virtual memory pages to a list of physical addresses and sends the list of physical addresses to a hardware unit which performs the tracking by detecting write backs on a coherence interconnect coupled to the hardware unit. After the application ends tracking, the application requests a list of dirty cache lines. In response to the request, the operating system obtains the list of dirty cache lines from the hardware unit and adds the list to a buffer that the application can read. In other embodiments, the operating system can perform the tracking without the application making the request.
