DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

CACHE(8)                            LMBENCH                           CACHE(8)

NAME
       cache - cache parameters

SYNOPSIS
       cache [ -L <line size> ] [ -M <len> ] [ -W <warmups> ] [ -N
       <repetitions> ]

DESCRIPTION
       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.

BUGS
       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.

SEE ALSO
       lmbench(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)