CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++cachingsolarisaixhp-ux
okun
okun

Reputation: 338

How to obtain cache line size on commercial UNIX OSes from a C/C++ program?

It is easy enough to find the answer for Windows, Linux and OSX on the web, but how about on commercial UNIX operating systems like AIX (on POWER), HP-UX (on Itanium) and Solaris (on SPARC). Experimenting with false cache line sharing code is not the answer I'm looking for.

Edit: Added the CPU architectures.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1200

Answers (3)

Etienne PIERRE
Etienne PIERRE

Reputation: 328

You can have a look at the hwloc library (BSD license) which gives this kind of information for different systems and architectures. You can either use the command line tool lstopo or the provided API (see documentation).

Upvotes: 0

jlliagre
jlliagre

Reputation: 30823

For Solaris (on both SPARC and x86 architectures) you can use that command:

$ prtpicl -v -c cpu | grep -i cache-line-size
  :l1-dcache-line-size   0x40 
  :l1-icache-line-size   0x40 
  :l2-cache-line-size    0x40

Upvotes: 2

Ben Voigt
Ben Voigt

Reputation: 283684

If you're trying to optimize performance, then benchmarking is exactly what you should do. For an example, see ATLAS.

If you're not trying to optimize performance, why do you care about the cache line size, and do you also care about the number of lines and the associativity?

What CPU architectures do you need to support?

Upvotes: 2

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