Patent ID: 8392663

Claim:
A method of maintaining cache coherence in a multi-core processor comprising a plurality of cores coupled to a cache coherence manager, each core having a processing core and an associated cache, the method comprising: receiving a command to perform a cache maintenance operation at a first processing core in the multi-core processor; detecting if the cache maintenance operation is a coherent operation; sending a coherent request to the cache coherence manager for distribution to one or more of the processing cores that are in a coherent domain of the first processing core, and canceling execution of the cache maintenance operation at the first processing core when the cache maintenance operation is detected as being a coherent operation; receiving a plurality of messages from the cache coherence manager, the plurality of messages including at least one message corresponding to the coherent request; and executing the cache maintenance operation at the first processing core based on the at least one message corresponding to the coherent request.