Reasoning about the ARM weakly consistent memory model

Authors:
Nathan Chong;Samin Ishtiaq
Affiliations:
ARM Ltd, Cambridge, UK;ARM Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Memory systems performance and correctness: held in conjunction with the Thirteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '08)
Year:
2008

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Abstract

This paper describes a formalization of the ARM weakly consistent memory model: the architectural contract between parallel programs and shared memory multiprocessor implementations. We claim that a clean, unambiguous, and mechanically verifiable specification is a valuable resource for architects, micro-architects and programmers; it allows implementors to forge aggressive static (compiler) and dynamic (JIT, micro-architecture) machines to run code. We discuss the key construct of the ARM memory model, observability -- the order in which memory accesses become visible to processors in a shared memory multiprocessor system -- and examine its use in litmus tests.