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It has been suggested to me that the L2 cache is turned off by default on the Pi, and that turning it on could improve CPU performance (probably at the expense of GPU performance). I'm keen to explore this. This is my questions:

  • How do I check if the L2 cache is turned on?
  • How can I turn on the L2 cache?
  • Are there any particular issues to be aware of when doing this?
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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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If you are using recent version of Raspbian, it should already be enabled by default - as posted in the release notes here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1040

You can enable/disable L2 cache by using the disable_l2cache setting in /boot/config.txt. But before you rush there there's couple of things to consider:

  • It's not free performance boost - you will take the cache away from GPU - which probably needs it more, unless you're running headless system.

  • You need to get kernel that matches the L2 cache setting - this depends on your distro. Instructions on compiling your own kernels are at: http://elinux.org/RPi_Kernel_Compilation

There are more details on config.txt - the GPU configuration file at: http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt

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