The effect of trace inaccuracies on the evaluation of cache performance using trace driven simulation is examined. It is demonstrated that very inaccurate results are obtained when using a trace from which all operating system references have been removed. The notion of trace components is defined, providing a framework for quantifying the error in simulation results when portions of the complete reference sequence are missing from the trace. Using a set of accurate and complete traces taken from an i486 system running Mach 2.6, it is established that omission of a small fraction of the operating system references can lead to very inaccurate simulation results.
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