[Gems-users] Supervisor L2 cache access dominate?

[Xuan Qi <xqi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear everyone,

I am running mpeg2 encoder on simulated machine (2 core 512MB memory
8MB L2 cahce). And I observed that supervisor L2 cache access
dominates. This is the stats dumped by ruby:

...
instruction_executed: 939463858 [ 451064400 488399458 ]
...
  L2_cache_access_mode_type_SupervisorMode:   237275    81.4211%
  L2_cache_access_mode_type_UserMode:   54142    18.5789%
...

I have also tried to manually CREATE user mode L2 cache misses by
repeatedly accessing a big array which is larger than L2 cache on a
machine warmed up with 100M instruction. Still supervisor L2 access is roughly
80%.

As I have never tried other workloads such as SPLASH2, I am wondering
anybody observes the similar case when running other workloads? Is it
normal or I did something wrong in my configuration?

Thank you very much...

Best regards,
Xuan Qi