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US 7,117,311 B1Granted
Hot plug cache coherent interface method and apparatus
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsLinda J. Rankin, Shivnandan D. Kaushik, James B. Crossland, Mohan J. Kumar, David J. O'Shea
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A computing device maintains coherency while supporting addition and removal of memory caching agents without rebooting the computing device.
Claims26
A method comprising
- receiving a request to remove a hot plug module from a running computing device;
- and
- updating a snoop filter of the running computing device to cease snooping of the hot plug module.
A midplane comprising
- a plurality of couplers to detachably couple hot plug modules to a running computing device;
- and
- a switch to interconnect the plurality of couplers and to cease issuing snoop transactions to a coupler of the plurality of couplers associated with a hot plug module to be removed from the running computing device.
A machine readable storage medium for processing snoop transactions comprising a plurality of instructions that in response to being executed result in a computing device
- causing caching agents associated with a coupler of the computing device to write back modified lines to a memory of the computing device;
- and
- updating a valid vector to indicate that the coupler is no longer associated with one or more valid caching agents;
- and
- updating the valid vector in response to a hot plug removal request.
2 more elements
A computing device comprising,
- a memory,
- a hot plug module comprising a coupler and one or more caching agents having cached lines of the memory;
- a midplane comprising a coupler detachably coupled to the coupler of the hot plug module and a snoop filter to track the cached lines of the one or more caching agents;
- and
- a processor coupled to the hot plug module via the midplane, the processor to cause the snoop filter to mark the one or more caching agents as invalid snooping agents in response to a request to remove the hot plug module.
2 more elements
A snoop filter comprising
- storage to store coherency information for lines cached by caching agents of hot plug modules;
- and
- a controller to update the coherency information in response to a request to remove a hot plug module from a computing device.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.