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Mixed-size concurrency: ARM, POWER, C/C++11, and SC

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Flur, S 
Sarkar, S 
Pulte, C 
Nienhuis, K 
Maranget, L 

Abstract

Previous work on the semantics of relaxed shared-memory concurrency has only considered the case in which each load reads the data of exactly one store. In practice, however, multiprocessors support mixed-size accesses, and these are used by systems software and (to some degree) exposed at the C/C++ language level. A semantic foundation for software, therefore, has to address them. We investigate the mixed-size behaviour of ARMv8 and IBM POWER architectures and implementations: by experiment, by developing semantic models, by testing the correspondence between these, and by discussion with ARM and IBM staff. This turns out to be surprisingly subtle, and on the way we have to revisit the fundamental concepts of coherence and sequential consistency, which change in this setting. In particular, we show that adding a memory barrier between each instruction does not restore sequential consistency. We go on to extend the C/C++11 model to support nonatomic mixed-size memory accesses, and prove the standard compilation scheme from C11 atomics to POWER remains sound. This is a necessary step towards semantics for real-world shared-memory concurrent code, beyond litmus tests.

Description

Keywords

Relaxed Memory Models, mixed-size, semantics, ISA

Journal Title

ACM SIGPLAN Notices

Conference Name

POPL '17: The 44th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

Journal ISSN

1523-2867
1558-1160

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K008528/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H027351/1)