CACHE(8) LMBENCH CACHE(8)NAMEcache - cache parameters
SYNOPSIScache [ -L <line size> ] [ -M <len> ] [ -W <warmups> ] [ -N <repeti‐
tions> ]
DESCRIPTIONcache 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 mea‐
suring the memory latency for various memory sizes. Once it has iden‐
tified 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.
BUGScache is an experimental benchmark and is known to fail on many proces‐
sors. 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.
SEE ALSOlmbench(8), line(8), tlb(8), par_mem(8).
AUTHOR
Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy
Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are always welcome.
(c)2000 Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy$Date$ CACHE(8)
