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The memory order is said to be strong or sequentially consistent when either the order of operations cannot change or when such changes have no visible effect on any thread. [1] [4] Conversely, the memory order is called weak or relaxed when one thread cannot predict the order of operations arising from another thread.
Modern programming languages like Java therefore implement a memory model. The memory model specifies synchronization barriers that are established via special, well-defined synchronization operations such as acquiring a lock by entering a synchronized block or method. The memory model stipulates that changes to the values of shared variables ...
Program order guarantees that each process issues a memory request ordered by its program and write atomicity defines that memory requests are serviced based on the order of a single FIFO queue. In relaxing program order, any or all the ordering of operation pairs, write-after-write, read-after-write, or read/write-after-read, can be relaxed.
For example, reading a 64-bit value from memory may actually be implemented as two sequential reads of two 32-bit memory locations. If a process has only read the first 32 bits, and before it reads the second 32 bits the value in memory gets changed, it will have neither the original value nor the new value but a mixed-up value.
Mathematically, there is a partial order called the happens-before order over all actions performed by the program. The happens-before order subsumes the program order; if one action occurs before another in the program order, it will occur before the other in the happens-before order. In addition, releases and subsequent acquisitions of locks ...
The following multi-threaded program, running on a multi-core processor gives an example of how such out-of-order execution can affect program behavior: Initially, memory locations x and f both hold the value 0. The software thread running on processor #1 loops while the value of f is zero, then it prints the value of x.
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However, on the 80386, with its paged memory management unit it is possible to protect individual memory pages against writing. [4] [5] Memory models are not limited to 16-bit programs. It is possible to use segmentation in 32-bit protected mode as well (resulting in 48-bit pointers) and there exist C language compilers which support that. [6]