caching - Is there a way to disable CPU cache (L1/L2) on a Linux system?

Question

I am profiling some code on a Linux system (running on Intel Core i7 4500U) to obtain the time of ONLY the execution costs. The application is the demo mpeg2dec from libmpeg2. I am trying to obtain a probability distribution for the mpeg2 execution times. However we want to see the raw execution cost when cache is switched off.

Is there a way I can disable the cpu cache of my system via a Linux command, or via a gcc flag ? or even set the cpu (L1/L2) cache size to 0KB ? or even add some code changed to disable cache ? Of course, without modifying or rebuilding the kernel.

Answer 1

See this 2012 thread, someone posted a tiny kernel module source to disable cache through asm.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-kernel-70/disabling-cpu-caches-936077/