Abstract
Processor cores within modern multicore systems often communicate via shared memory and use (local) store buffers to improve performance. A penalty for this improvement is the loss of Sequential Consistency to weaker memory guarantees that increase the number of possible program behaviours, and hence, require a greater amount of programming effort. This paper formalises the effect of Total Store Order (TSO) memory — a weak memory model that allows a write followed by a read in the program order to be reordered during execution. Although the precise effects of TSO are well-known, a high-level formalisation of programs that execute under TSO has not been developed. We present an interval-based semantics for programs that execute under TSO memory and include methods for fine-grained expression evaluation, capturing the non-determinism of both concurrency and TSO-related reorderings.
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Dongol, B., Travkin, O., Derrick, J., Wehrheim, H. (2013). A High-Level Semantics for Program Execution under Total Store Order Memory. In: Liu, Z., Woodcock, J., Zhu, H. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2013. ICTAC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8049. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39718-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39718-9_11
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