cache.8

.\" $Id$
.TH CACHE 8 "$Date$" "(c)2000 Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy" "LMBENCH"
.SH NAME
cache \- cache parameters
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B cache
[
.I "-L <line size>"
]
[
.I "-M <len>"
]
[
.I "-W <warmups>"
]
[
.I "-N <repetitions>"
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B 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 
.I len
bytes.  
.LP
.B 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.
.SH BUGS
.B 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
.B cache
and prevent it from accurately determining the number and size of the
various caches.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
lmbench(8), line(8), tlb(8), par_mem(8).
.SH "AUTHOR"
Carl Staelin and Larry McVoy
.PP
Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are always welcome.