Is it possible to put some entity configuration in annotations, and some of it in the xml configuration file?

I need to implement a second level cache in an environment where there are many applications sharing data objects across different JVMs. In this situation, sometimes a particular application needs read-only caching, and a different application (running in a different VM) needs read-write caching of the same objects. Because of this, I need to be able to change the caching (read-only or read-write) depending on where the code is being used. This seems easiest if I have the caching configured in the xml instead of in annotations. I don't want to put everything in xml as that defeats one of the key benefits of hibernate over my previous ORM, and I already have a large code base with annotations in place.

Alternatively, how big is the performance hit of using read-write caching instead of read-only?

Thanks

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