AN APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR HANDLING CACHE MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS

Apparatus has plurality of requester elements and a cache hierarchy. A requester element issues a cache maintenance operation request specifying a memory address range to push a data block through at least one level of the cache hierarchy and to make that block visible to other requester elements. The given requester element detects when there is a need to issue a write request prior to the cache maintenance operation request in order to cause a write operation to be performed in respect of data within the specified memory address range, and issues a combined write and cache maintenance operation request instead of a write request and a subsequent cache maintenance operation request. A recipient completer element that receives the combined request initiates processing of the cache maintenance operation without waiting for the write operation to complete. This reduces latency in handling of cache maintenance operations, and reduces bandwidth utilisation.