Patent attributes
A method and structure is disclosed for constraining cache line replacement that processes a cache miss in a computer system. The invention contains a K-way set associative cache that selects lines in the cache for replacement. The invention constrains the selecting process so that only a predetermined subset of each set of cache lines is selected for replacement. The subset has at least a single cache line and the set size is at least two cache lines. The invention may further select between at least two cache lines based upon which of the cache lines was accessed least recently. A selective enablement of the constraining process is based on a free space memory condition of a memory associated with the cache memory. The invention may further constrain cache line replacement based upon whether the cache miss is from a non-local node in a nonuniform-memory-access system. The invention may also process cache writes so that a predetermined subset of each set is known to be in an unmodified state.
