Page Coloring

The Alpha EV4 CPU contains a direct mapped physical OFF chip secondary cache, which is organized so that if the secondary cache size is N pages, then every Nth page of the physical pages of memory hashes into the same page. Digital UNIX VM manages the physical pages of memory in such a way that, if an entire resident working set of a process can fit into the secondary cache, VM places it there. As a result, because VM strives to ensure that a process's entire working set is always in the secondary cache, the number of physical memory accesses is greatly reduced as a process executes.