Re: Origin of some Keykos ideas Jonathan Shapiro (shap@viper.cis.upenn.edu)
Wed, 23 Nov 94 10:10:50 -0500

One exception to this, I think, is the cache design on the RS/6000 which I have heard had some sort of mode that supported transaction abort by keeping updates in cache until the transaction completed. I don't know the entire design.

The RS/6000 MMU provided hardware-implemented locking of main memory at the granularity of a cache line. To the best of my knowledge, the cache did not provide features specific to transaction abort.

As it turned out, the transaction support was broken, and was removed in subsequent chip revisions.

Jonathan