Raid system for performing efficient mirrored posted-write operations

Abstract

A bus bridge on a primary RAID controller receives user write data from a host and writes the data to its write cache and also broadcasts the data over a high speed link (e.g., PCI-Express) to a secondary RAID controller's bus bridge, which writes the data to its mirroring write cache. However, before writing the data, the second bus bridge automatically invalidates the cache buffers to which the data is to be written, which alleviates the primary controller's CPU from sending a message to the secondary controller's CPU to instruct it to invalidate the cache buffers. The secondary controller CPU programs its bus bridge at boot time with the base address of its mirrored write cache to enable it to detect that the cache buffer needs invalidating in response to the broadcast write, and with the base address of its directory that includes the cache buffer valid bits.