Hi all,
    I am using gem5 with version 20.1.0.5. I am running a matrix arithmetic 
application in SE mode with ARM architecture.
   The system I am simulating includes CPU,icache,dcache, l2cache, and dram. 
The l2cache has a stride prefetcher. Here are my problems about this stride 
prefetcher:

1) the application generates 8128 prefetch candidates and adds them to the 
queue, but only 149 of them eventually go to MSHR and generate prefetcher MSHR 
miss and go to DDR to get the prefetch data. The big difference between the 
number of prefetchers MSHR miss and the number of prefetches issued confused 
me. So I use debug-flag = HWPrefetch to find out the reason. from the debug 
file it seems the number of prefetches (8128) is right, but these two numbers 
so different still confused me. Here are the stats.out:

system.l2.overall_mshr_misses::.l2.prefetcher          149                      
 # number of overall MSHR misses

system.l2.prefetcher.pfIssued                    8128                       # 
number of hwpf issued
system.l2.prefetcher.pfIdentified                8128                       # 
number of prefetch candidates identified
system.l2.prefetcher.pfBufferHit                    0                       # 
number of redundant prefetches already in prefetch queue
system.l2.prefetcher.pfInCache                      0                       # 
number of redundant prefetches already in cache/mshr dropped
system.l2.prefetcher.pfRemovedFull                  0                       # 
number of prefetches dropped due to prefetch queue size
system.l2.prefetcher.pfSpanPage                  1344                       # 
number of prefetches that crossed the page

2) I try to change the degree of stride prefetcher, the default value is 8 and 
I change it to 1. The stats show that the number of unused prefetcher blocks 
(evicted before use) is bigger than the number of MSHR l2prefetcher miss. It is 
like l2cache evicts more prefetched blocks than it actually prefetches and is 
not correct. The stats are as follow:

system.l2.unused_prefetches                       134                       # 
number of HardPF blocks evicted w/o reference
system.l2.overall_mshr_misses::.l2.prefetcher          127                      
 # number of overall MSHR misses


Thanks and regards
Fugelin
 Xi'an Jiaotong University
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