Over the weekend I conducted several experiments with caching using my 3B2 simulator. I learned a few critical bits of information. For background, see this post and this post.
The first and most important thing I learned is that indexing cache entries only by their tags /does not work/. There are collisions galore, and no way to recover from them. However, if I index SD cache entries by the full SSL, and PD cache entries by the full SSL+PSL, everything seems to work perfectly. This leaves several big questions unanswered, but they are probably unanswerable. After all, I have no way of looking inside the MMU to see how it actually indexes entries in its cache, I can only go on published information and make educated guesses.
Second, I learned that implementing MMU caching is required for the 3B2 simulator to work correctly. Until this weekend, I had not implemented any caching in the simulated MMU because I assumed that caching was only used for performance reasons and could be skipped. But this is not true. In fact, UNIX SVR3 changes page descriptors in memory without flushing the cache and relies on the MMU to use the old values until it requests a flush. Not having implemented caching was a source of several serious bugs in the simulator.
Third, I learned that the “Cacheable” bit in segment descriptors is inverted. When it’s a 1, caching is disabled. When it’s a 0, caching is enabled.
The 3B2/400 simulator now makes it all the way through booting the SVR3 kernel and starting /etc/init. There are some other bugs preventing init from spawning new processes, but I hope to have these ironed out soon.
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