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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/memory-barriers.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/memory-barriers.txt | 15 |
1 files changed, 10 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt index 4710845dbac..cc53f47a83e 100644 --- a/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt +++ b/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt @@ -262,9 +262,14 @@ What is required is some way of intervening to instruct the compiler and the CPU to restrict the order. Memory barriers are such interventions. They impose a perceived partial -ordering between the memory operations specified on either side of the barrier. -They request that the sequence of memory events generated appears to other -parts of the system as if the barrier is effective on that CPU. +ordering over the memory operations on either side of the barrier. + +Such enforcement is important because the CPUs and other devices in a system +can use a variety of tricks to improve performance - including reordering, +deferral and combination of memory operations; speculative loads; speculative +branch prediction and various types of caching. Memory barriers are used to +override or suppress these tricks, allowing the code to sanely control the +interaction of multiple CPUs and/or devices. VARIETIES OF MEMORY BARRIER @@ -461,8 +466,8 @@ Whilst this may seem like a failure of coherency or causality maintenance, it isn't, and this behaviour can be observed on certain real CPUs (such as the DEC Alpha). -To deal with this, a data dependency barrier must be inserted between the -address load and the data load: +To deal with this, a data dependency barrier or better must be inserted +between the address load and the data load: CPU 1 CPU 2 =============== =============== |