David A Clinton

US Patent:

8495301, Jul 23, 2013

Filed:

Nov 3, 2010

Appl. No.:

12/939128

Inventors:

Praveen Alexander - Royersford PA, US
Cheng Yi - Vancouver CA, US
Tao Zhong - Coquitlam CA, US
David J. Clinton - Coopersburg PA, US
Gary Nichols - Auburn CA, US

Assignee:

PMC-Sierra US, Inc. - Santa Clara CA

International Classification:

G06F 13/00

US Classification:

711118, 711154, 710 22, 710 23, 710 26

Abstract:

A scatter gather cache system and method are provided, which increase performance of scatter-gather DMA operations by reducing the time taken by the DMA engine to perform a logical to physical address translation. This is done primarily by two-dimensional caching of scatter-gather elements of selected scatter-gather lists using a novel indexing, line swapping and replacement methodology. The cache can also include a context victim table (CVT) for storing scatter-gather list contexts from evicted cache entries and also allows for pre-fetching of SGL elements from Scatter-Gather Lists (SGL). It also provides coherency support when there are multiple instances of the cache accessing the same memory space.