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cache - cache parameters
cache [ -L <line size> ] [ -M <len> ] [
-W <warmups> ] [ -N <repetitions> ]
cache tries to determine the characteristics
of the memory hierarchy. It attempts to determine the number of caches,
the size of each cache, the line size for each cache, and the available
memory parallelism at each level in the memory hierarchy. The largest amount
of memory it will examine is len bytes.
cache first attempts to determine
the number and size of caches by measuring the memory latency for various
memory sizes. Once it has identified the various caches it then measures
the latency, parallelism, and line size for each cache. Unfortunately,
determining the cache size merely from latency is exceedingly difficult
due to variations in cache replacement and prefetching strategies.
cache
is an experimental benchmark and is known to fail on many processors. In
particular there are a large number of machines with weird caching behavior
that confuse cache and prevent it from accurately determining the number
and size of the various caches.
lmbench(8)
, line(8)
, tlb(8)
, par_mem(8)
.
Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy
Comments, suggestions, and bug reports
are always welcome.
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