On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 08:46:55AM +0530, Amit Kapila wrote: > As per my understanding of the general theory around barriers, > read and write are defined to avoid reordering due to compiler and > full memory barriers are defined to avoid reordering due to processors. > There are some processors that support instructions for memory > barriers with acquire, release and fence semantics.
Not exactly, both compilers and processors can rearrange loads and stores. Because the architecture most developers work on (x86) has such a strong memory model (it's goes to lot of effort to hide reordering) people are under the impression that it's only the compiler you need to worry about, but that's not true for any other architechture. Memory barriers/fences are on the whole discouraged if you can use acquire/release semantics because the latter are faster and much easier to optimise for. I strongly recommend the "Atomic Weapons" talk on the C11 memory model to help understand how they work. As a bonus it includes correct implementations for the major architectures. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <klep...@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does > not attach much importance to his own thoughts. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
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