Patent ID: 8543766

Claim:
A method comprising: storing a state indicator associated with a cache line wherein the state indicator is stored in a tracking entry associated with a region of system memory, wherein the cache line is one of a plurality of cache lines each associated with a corresponding unique section of the region of system memory, wherein the plurality of cache lines includes N cache lines in which N is a number of cache lines needed to store all of the region of system memory, the state indicator is one of a plurality of state indicators each associated with a corresponding cache line of the plurality of cache lines such that every cache line of the plurality of cache lines has an associated state indicator of the plurality of state indicators; and the tracking entry comprises each of the plurality of state indicators, wherein each state indicator comprises: a dirty indication when the associated cache line is a candidate for writing data stored in the cache line to the associated section of the region of system memory, and a clean indication when the associated cache line is not a candidate for writing data stored in the cache line to the associated section of the region of system memory, determining, for the region of system memory, a number of the plurality of state indicators that comprise the dirty indication; and if the determined number of dirty indications exceeds a threshold, then selecting a cache line, writing the data stored in the cache line to the associated section of the region of system memory, and storing a clean indication in the state indicator corresponding to the cache line, wherein the clean indication identifies that the cache line is not a candidate for writing data stored in the cache line to the associated section of the region of system memory.