Re: Memory Barrier Definitions

Andi Kleen (ak@suse.de)
Wed, 8 May 2002 17:49:25 +0200


On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 10:27:10AM -0500, Dave Engebretsen wrote:
> I am curious what the definition of memory barriers is for IA64, Sparc,
> and x86-64.
>
> >From what I can tell, sparc and x86-64 are like alpha and map directly
> to the existing mb, wmb, and rmb semantics, incluing ordering between
> system memory and I/O space. Is that an accurate assesment?

I don't think it is true for alpha, but it is true
for x86-64. x86-64 by default has strong ordering for most loads/stores.
It is possible to use weak ordering for special marked stores. For that
there are special read and write and read/write barriers which apply
to all memory (not distinction between io space and other memory). In
addition there is a way to mark special memory areas as write combining and
some other settings, but that is ordered by the normal barriers too.

-Andi

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/