how to solve aliasing problem

Aliasing causes a substantial problem because it is often difficult or impossible to decide what objects a pointer may refer to. A compiler must be conservative; some compilers will not allocate any local variables of a procedure in a register when there is a pointer that may refer to one of  the local variables.

A third reason why virtual caches are not more popular is that operating systems and user programs may use two different virtual addresses for the same physical address. These duplicate addresses, called synonyms or aliases, could result in two copies of the same data in a virtual cache; if one is modified, the other will have the wrong value. With a physical cache this wouldn’t happen, since the accesses would first be translated to the same physical cache block.

 

Hardware solutions to the synonym problem, called antialiasing, guarantee every cache block a unique physical address. The Opteron uses a 64 KB instruction cache with an 4 KB page and two-way set associativity, hence the hardware must handle aliases involved with the three virtual address bits in the set index. It avoids aliases by simply checking all eight possible locations on a miss—two blocks in each of four sets—to be sure that none match the physical address of the data being fetched. If one is found, it is invalidated, so when the new data are loaded into the cache their physical address is guaranteed to be unique.

 

Software can make this problem much easier by forcing aliases to share some address bits. An older version of UNIX from Sun Microsystems, for example, required all aliases to be identical in the last 18 bits of their addresses; this restriction is called page coloring. Note that page coloring is simply set-associative mapping applied to virtual memory: The 4 KB (2^12) pages are mapped using 64 (2^6) sets to ensure that the physical and virtual addresses match in the last 18 bits. This restriction means a direct-mapped cache that is 2^18(256K) bytes or smaller can never have duplicate physical addresses for blocks. From the perspective of the cache, page coloring effectively increases the page offset, as software guarantees that the last few bits of the virtual and physical page address are identical.