On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Peter Wemm wrote:
> - AMD write cache allocation due to speculative writes being cancelled and
> then written back later vs no cache snooping on AGP regions. I'm somewhat
> perplexed about this issue, there's lots of conflicting info going around,
> a good deal of it which does not make much sense [to me :-)]. I really
> dont see what PSE has to do with this for several reasons.. if the page/
> region is cacheable, why does a 4MB vs 4K page make any difference?
> cacheable vs no-cache-snooping is a recipe for disaster.. why would 4K
> pages on a non-coherent region be safer? Or is the problem that write
> allocation happens on uncacheable/non-write-back regions in 4MB pages? Or
> something else?
>
Speculative writes can only happen to pages in the TLB (so you don't get
speculative TLB misses and replacements), not having a large amount of 4M
pages around in the TLB means that addresses covered by these can't
possibly be involved in speculative writes.
I personaly suspect the reason the cache line flushes of speculatively
"written to" cache lines derive from the AMD-s use of MOESI coherency and
mapping that to actual bits. Another "minor" side effect is that you get
direct cache-to-cahce transfers in SMP systems for shared data.
Sander
> Cheers,
> -Peter
> --
> Peter Wemm - [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
>
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