I am curious. In this design, if we wanna get an exclusive on a certain cache line, does it mean we have to traverse through the whole list across all the processors on this list and evict them?
bpr
@Tengjiao, I presume you mean hold the cache line exclusively and not in the (E) Exclusive state. If so, yes, the processor would issue the request to the directory which would send an invalidation and forward message to the first cache, which would forward to the next cache and so forth. As we said in class today, this can be slow, but if it is infrequent then that is still a win for the system.
I am curious. In this design, if we wanna get an exclusive on a certain cache line, does it mean we have to traverse through the whole list across all the processors on this list and evict them?
@Tengjiao, I presume you mean hold the cache line exclusively and not in the (E) Exclusive state. If so, yes, the processor would issue the request to the directory which would send an invalidation and forward message to the first cache, which would forward to the next cache and so forth. As we said in class today, this can be slow, but if it is infrequent then that is still a win for the system.