Oldland Memory Hierarchy

CPU core has 2 memory busses: - 32 bit read-only word addressed instruction bus. - 32 bit read/write word addressed data bus with byte enables.

The instruction bus feeds to the instruction cache which is configurable size. There are inputs to invalidate the entire cache or an address range. The cache is physically indexed and physically tagged if the MMU is enabled, otherwise physically indexed.

Peripherals on the instruction bus are: - Onchip bootrom. - SDRAM. - Onchip memory.

The data cache is physically indexed and physically tagged. Allocation policy is allocate on read. The cache is write-back and write-misses go through a write buffer.

Each peripheral indicates the cacheability for the entirety of the peripherals address space. Non-cacheable peripherals will never have data cached regardless of any page table settings (though page tables can be used to control read/write access).

Instruction cache is enabled with the C bit of the PSR, data cache is enabled with the D bit of the PSR.

Physical addresses with the MSB (31) set are automatically non-cached accesses and therefore used for peripherals where memory-mapped I/O is performed.

Maintenance Instructions

Instruction cache:

• I_INV index

Data cache:

• D_INV index Invalidate cache line for index.
• D_FLUSH index Flush cache line for index.

TLB:

• INVAL_TLB Invalidate all TLB entries.
• DTLB_STORE_VIRT virt_mapping Store the virtual mapping and permissions for an instruction TLB entry.
• DTLB_STORE_PHYS phys_address Store the physical mapping for an instruction TLB entry.
• ITLB_STORE_VIRT virt_mapping Store the virtual mapping and permissions for a data TLB entry.
• ITLB_STORE_PHYS phys_address Store the physical mapping for a data TLB entry.

All maintenance instructions are encoded into a single cache instruction:

cache $rn, op

For instructions that don’t take a parameter the $rn register should be set to 0.

Cache tags + indexes

Cache lines are 32 bytes, so 5 bits for byte offset, cache line is word indexed so only 3 bits for the real offset. For a cache of N bytes and M ways we have (N/M)/32 indexes so $clog2((N/M)/32) bits.

8KB cache, 2 ways:

• 20 bits tag.
• 7 bits index.
• 5 bits offset.

Reset

On reset, all cache lines are clean + invalid.

Debug

For debugging, a new operation CACHE_SYNC flushes the data cache and invalidates the entire instruction cache and should be used after memory writes.