Re: Undersized L2 cache: any tricks?

Bradley M Keryan (keryan@andrew.cmu.edu)
Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:08:47 -0500 (EST)


On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, B. James Phillippe wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> Some co-workers of mine have put together an x86-based system on which to
> run Linux, which has 256MB physical memory and 512k L2 cache. The
> processor is something like an AMDK6 3XXMhz or Pentium equivalent. To no
> surprise, the system runs slower with the full 256MB than it does with
> 64MB, I'm guessing due to the undersized cache. The problem is that the
> mainboard is apparently only capable of 512K of L2 cache. I am not an
> expert in memory/cache-related stuff, but my guess is that there is no
> performance solution other than to decrease the physical memory (or get a
> new mainboard). The kernel is 2.0. Are there any other options?
>

The slram patch at http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~keryan/slram/ will let you
use it as swap/ramdisk but will probably not be very useful because
demand-paged executables will be continually reread off of disk.

A VIA MVP3-based motherboard is one option; I believe that most of the
boards that have 1MB cache will cache 256MB (and no more) but YMMV so
check with the manufacturer first.

Brad

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