Oracle International Corporation

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Aaron S Wynn

Ramaswamy Sivaramakrishnan

Michael Frank Deering

Ali Vahidsafa

Connie W Cheung

Connie Wai Mun Cheung

Jiejun Lu

Satarupa Bose

The systems and methods described herein may provide a flush-retire instruction for retiring 'bad' cache locations (e.g., locations associated with persistent errors) to prevent their allocation for any further accesses, and a flush-unretire instruction for unretiring cache locations previously retired. These instructions may be implemented as hardware instructions of a processor. They may be executable by processes executing in a hyper-privileged state, without the need to quiesce any other processes. The flush-retire instruction may atomically flush a cache line implicated by a detected cache error and set a lock bit to disable subsequent allocation of the corresponding cache location. The flush-unretire instruction may atomically flush an identified cache line (if valid) and clear the lock bit to re-enable subsequent allocation of the cache location. Various bits in the encodings of these instructions may identify the cache location to be retired or unretired in terms of the physical cache structure.

Systems and methods for retiring and unretiring cache lines

A method for managing multiple nodes hosting multiple memory segments, including: identifying a failure of a first node hosting a first memory segment storing a hypervisor; identifying a second memory segment storing a shadow of the hypervisor and hosted by a second node; intercepting, after the failure, a hypervisor access request (HAR) generated by a core of a third node and comprising a physical memory address comprising multiple node identification (ID) bits identifying the first node; modifying the multiple node ID bits of the physical memory address to identify the second node; and accessing a location in the shadow of the hypervisor specified by the physical address of the HAR after the multiple node ID bits are modified.

Dynamic hypervisor relocation

A cache memory system includes a cache controller and a cache tag array. The cache tag array includes one or more ways, one or more indices, and a cache tag entry for each way and index combination. Each cache tag entry includes an error correction portion and an address portion. In response to an address request for data that includes a first index and a first address, the cache controller compares the first address to the cache tag entries of the cache tag array that correspond to the first index. When the comparison results in a miss, the cache controller corrects cache tag entries with an error that correspond to the first index using the corresponding error correction portions, and stores at least one of the corrected cache tag entries in a storage that is external to the cache tag array. The cache controller, for each corrected cache tag entry, replays the comparison using the least one of the externally stored corrected cache tag entries.

Cache tag array with hard error proofing

A memory subsystem is disclosed. The memory subsystem includes a memory controller coupled to one or more memory modules. Each memory module comprises a buffer coupled to one or more memory ranks. A clock source is coupled to provide a clock signal to each of the memory modules. The memory controller is configured to convey a clock enable (CKE) command to one of the memory modules, the CKE command corresponding to a given memory rank. In response to the CKE command, a memory module buffer associated with the given memory rank is configured to convey a CKE disable signal to the given memory rank. The given memory rank is configured to disable operation of the clock signal within the given memory rank, responsive to the CKE disable signal.

Clock enable throttling for power savings in a memory subsystem

Three-dimensional compressed geometry is decompressed with a unit having an input FIFO receiving compressed data bits and outputting to an input block state machine and an input block, whose outputs are coupled to a barrel shifter unit. Input block output also is input to Huffman tables that output to the state machine. The state machine output also is coupled to a data path controller whose output is coupled to a tag decoder, and to a normal processor receiving output from the barrel shifter unit. The decompressor unit also includes a position/color processor that receives output from the barrel shifter unit. Outputs from the normal processor and position/color processor are multiplexed to a format converter. For instructions in the data stream that generate output to the format converter, the decompression unit generates a tag sent to the tag decoder in parallel with bits for normals that are sent to the format converter. The decompressed stream of triangle data may then be passed to a traditional rendering pipeline, where it can be processed in full floating point accuracy, and thereafter displayed or otherwise used.

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Aaron S Wynn