journal 2026-05-06

Banked auxiliary I-cache fill

P108 added the first instruction-side consumer for the auxiliary lower-bank response. The useful target was not raw I-cache background fill; that had 0 candidates under the current priority policy. The real instruction-side opportunity was blocked writeback prefetch.

The shell smoke reached P108-FILE-OK. The run consumed 488,027 auxiliary I-cache prefetch fills and 10,034,869 auxiliary D-cache background fills, with 0 auxiliary read errors. The shell window dropped from P107’s 65,269,213 cycles to 64,823,658 cycles.

Result: PASS for RTL simulation and shell profiling. Hardened layout: NOT RUN.