A method is disclosed which may include providing a cache in a computing system having an initial group of cache objects, the cache object having an initial compression ratio and including stored data; decreasing an amount of data storage space in the cache occupied by at least one of the cache objects other than a given one of the cache objects; and increasing an amount of data storage space in the cache occupied by the given cache object.

A system and method for managing power consumption and data integrity in a computer system is disclosed in which the a memory controller of the computer system records in a buffer the addresses of writes to system memory that occur during the period that the processor is in a low power state. When the processor exits the low power state, the processor invalidates in its internal cache those cache lines that correspond to the addresses recorded in the buffer.

A method for caching a block of data. The method including receiving a request to store the block and determining whether an active cache is able to expand. If the active cache is able to expand, then expanding the active cache to obtain an expanded active cache, and storing the block in the expanded active cache. If the active cache is not able to expand, then determining whether evictable blocks are present in the victim cache. If evictable blocks are present in the victim cache, then evicting...

Embodiments of the present invention provide methods and systems for tuning the size of the cache. In particular, when a page fault occurs, non-resident page data is checked to determine if that page was previously accessed. If the page is found in the non-resident page data, an inter-reference distance for the faulted page is determined and the distance of the oldest resident page is determined. The size of the cache may then be tuned based on comparing the inter-reference distance of the newly...

A computer system having patrol snoop sequencer that sequences through addresses of cache lines held in a higher level cache, making snoop reads using those addresses to a lower level cache. If a particular cache line held in the higher level cache is not held in the lower level cache, the particular cache line is identified as an eviction candidate in the higher level cache when a new cache line must be loaded into the higher level cache.

Embodiments of the present invention provide methods and systems for efficiently tracking evicted or non-resident pages. For each non-resident page, a first hash value is generated from the page's metadata, such as the page's mapping and offset parameters. This first hash value is then used as an index to point one of a plurality of circular buffers. Each circular buffer comprises an entry for a clock pointer and entries that uniquely represent non-resident pages. The clock pointer points to the...

A system having queue control structures includes a conflict avoidance mechanism to prevent memory bank conflicts for queue descriptor access. In one embodiment, a queue descriptor bank table contains information including in which memory bank each queue descriptor is stored.

Methods for a treatment of cached objects are described. In one embodiment, management of a region of a cache is configured with an eviction policy plug-in and a storage plug-in. The eviction policy plug-in includes code to evict an object that is cached in the region of cache. The storage plug-in includes code to execute a function involving a group manipulation function that gets each object within a pre-defined group of objects located within the region of cache, each object associated with a...

A method for concurrent garbage collection and mutator execution in a computer system includes scanning a first cache line for a non-local bit. The non-local bit is associated with a root object. A done bit associated with the first cache line is set. A second cache line to find a first object that is referenced by the root object is located. A mark bit and the done bit associated with the second cache line are set. The first and second cache lines are scanned for unset done bits. If an unset do...

A method for caching a block, which includes receiving a request to store the block in a cache and determining whether the cache is able to expand. If the cache is not able to expand, then determining whether evictable blocks are present in the cache and, if evictable blocks are present in the cache determining whether a total size of the evictable blocks is greater than or equal to a size of the block, evicting a sufficient number of the evictable blocks from the cache and storing the block in ...