disabling HW prefetch

[fbarisione]

Hi,
I'm doing a research for my thesis, counting the L1 cache misses and I need to know if is possible to disable the HW prefetch by software in my machine.

I can't do this in the BIOS, so I'm trying to realize how does it works and how it could affect the performance of an application.

Thanks.

[vweaver1]

Hi,
I'm doing a research for my thesis, counting the L1 cache misses and I need to know if is possible to disable the HW prefetch by software in my machine.

I can't do this in the BIOS, so I'm trying to realize how does it works and how it could affect the performance of an application.

Thanks.

In general the only machines out there where you can disable HW prefetch are Core2 machines. If you're doing your research on a core2 machine you can check out the utility found here:
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~vweaver1/proje ... h-disable/