
6.3 Multilevel Cache Hierarchies 393
the store-conditional does not miss unless it fails. However, this reintroduces the
second livelock situation: other copies are invalidated to obtain exclusive owner-
ship,
so their store-conditionals may fail without guarantee of this processor's store-
conditional succeeding. If this optimization is employed, some form of backoff
should be used between failed operations to minimize (though not completely elim-
inate) the probability of livelock.
MULTILEVEL CACHE HIERARCHIES
The simple design presented in the preceding section was illustrative, but it made
two simplifying assumptions that are not valid on