Content area

Abstract

There has been great progress recently in formally specifying the memory model of microprocessors like ARM and POWER. These specifications are, however, too complicated for reasoning about program behaviors, verifying compilers etc., because they involve microarchitectural details like the reorder buffer (ROB), partial and speculative execution, instruction replay on speculation failure, etc. In this paper we present a new Instantaneous Instruction Execution (I2E) framework which allows us to specify weak memory models in the same style as SC and TSO. Each instruction in I2E is executed instantaneously and in-order such that the state of the processor is always correct. The effect of instruction reordering is captured by the way data is moved between the processors and the memory non-deterministically, using three conceptual devices: invalidation buffers, timestamps and dynamic store buffers. We prove that I2E models capture the behaviors of modern microarchitectures and cache-coherent memory systems accurately, thus eliminating the need to think about microarchitectural details.

Details

1009240
Title
An Operational Framework for Specifying Memory Models using Instantaneous Instruction Execution
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2017
Publication date
May 16, 2017
Section
Computer Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2017-05-18
Milestone dates
2017-05-16 (Submission v1)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
18 May 2017
ProQuest document ID
2074423630
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/operational-framework-specifying-memory-models/docview/2074423630/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2017. This work is published under http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2019-09-09
Database
ProQuest One Academic