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Abstract

A system and method to use stream filters to defer deallocation of a stream based on the activity level of the stream, thereby preventing a stream thrashing situation from occurring. The least recently used ('LRU') stream is deallocated only after a number of potential new streams are detected. In a data processing system, a method for prefetching cache lines from a main memory to an L1 cache coupled to a processor coupled by a bus to the main memory, wherein the prefetching is augmented with the utilization of a stream buffer and a stream filter, wherein the stream buffer includes an address buffer and a data buffer, wherein the stream buffer hold one or more active streams, and wherein the stream filter contains one or more entries corresponding to one or more active streams, the method comprising the steps of monitoring a sequence of L1 cache misses; replacing entries in the stream filter in response to the L1 cache misses on an LRU basis; and maintaining one of the one or more active streams in the stream buffer until all of the one or more entries corresponding to the one of the one or more active streams have been replaced by the replacing step.

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First Claim