Monday, October 4, 2010

Memory ordering

Just had a couple of white papers published on memory ordering. This is a topic which is quite hard to find documentation on, and also quite complex. Fortunately, it's also rarely encountered.

In Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 we introduced the file mbarrier.h. This defines some intrinsics which allow the developer to enforce memory ordering.

The first paper covers avoiding the reordering of memory operations that the compiler may perform when compiling an application. The second paper covers the more complex issue of avoiding the reordering of memory operations that the processor may do at runtime.