Understanding perf mem -t load results

[Manuel Selva <manuel.selva@insa-lyon.fr>]

Hi all,

I am trying to understand the output of the perf mem tool on my workstation with two intel Xeon X5650.

I recorded a perf.data file with memory load sampling (write sampling is not availble for these processors) as following (in the root directory of a Linux kernel source tree):

perf mem -t load rec -c 1 make -j18

Then I am reporting the results with

perf mem rep --sort=mem

 97.00%      25519343  L1 hit
  1.31%         43687  L3 hit
  1.15%         37253  LFB hit
  0.32%          3156  Remote Cache (1 hop) hit
  0.14%         38579  L3 miss
  0.05%          6309  L2 hit
  0.03%           231  Remote RAM (1 hop) hit
  0.00%             8  Local RAM hit
  0.00%             2  Uncached hit

As you can see, 97% of the loads (I am sampling all loads with -c 1: is it true ?) hit the L1 cache. My first question is about this high L1 hit ration and the small number of RAM requests (231 + 8). Is it realistic to have 97% of L1 hit and only 239 RAM accesses when compiling a Linux kernel ? 

Writing this email and looking again into Intel SDM I am thinking that the L3 misses are what is called "unknown L3 cache miss in SDM". As a consequence the total number of memory accesses would be L3 miss + Remote RAM + Local RAM, is it correct ?

The second question is the Uncached hit: is it the Un-cacheable memory in the SDM ? If yes, I guess it's also a request to RAM.

Finally, it's not very clear for me what Line Fill Buffer (LFB) is exactly and I was not able to find a pointer explaining that. Do you know where I can read information about this ?

Thanks,

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Manuel