How do you change the associativity of the CPU cache?

Question

I'd like to collect data of L2 cache misses for different cache associativity settings . can anybody tell me how i could change the assocoiativity ? uSing Ubuntu on x86_64 Intel Core2 duo CPU

Answer 1

To the best of my knowledge this is a hardware design parameter that can't be reconfigured from software.

Typically, this kind of thing is optimized using hardware simulators. There has been research into software configurable caches, but I haven't heard of any making it into popular general purpose processors.

-either that or my architecture knowledge is way out of date...

Answer 2

I think Rob Cooke is correct that the chip's L2 cache can't be modified in software. But have a look at Cachegrind, a profiler that allows you to modify the settings of a simulated cache.