Abstract
This paper discusses methods to improve the cache performance, amidst the continued trend of increasing the cache size and decreasing the cache associativity. Increase in cache size requires more bits to index the cache and decrease in cache associativity increases the cache miss rate.
It is mainly concerned with the "page coloring", that controls the allocation of the physical page for a virtual address in such a way that more bits remain unchanged between the virtual and physical addresses during the address translation by the operating system. It ensures that virtual pages of different color don't contend for the same cache line thus reducing the miss rate. The page coloring makes the system more seterministic with regard to performance.

Authors Manoj Sharma Rangarajan Ramalingam Geetha Prasanna

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