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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.
In real mode, in order to calculate the physical address of a byte of memory, the hardware shifts the contents of the appropriate segment register 4 bits left (effectively multiplying by 16), and then adds the offset. For example, the logical address 7522:F139 yields the 20-bit physical address:
The memory model stipulates that changes to the values of shared variables only need to be made visible to other threads when such a synchronization barrier is reached. Moreover, the entire notion of a race condition is defined over the order of operations with respect to these memory barriers. [1]
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.
The Lamport timestamp algorithm is a simple logical clock algorithm used to determine the order of events in a distributed computer system.As different nodes or processes will typically not be perfectly synchronized, this algorithm is used to provide a partial ordering of events with minimal overhead, and conceptually provide a starting point for the more advanced vector clock method.
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.
The instruction memory, implemented as read-only memory from the viewpoint of the computer and designated ROM, holds assembled binary program code for execution. The random access memory , called RAM, provides storage for an executing program’s data and provides services and storage areas for the computer’s memory-mapped I/O mechanism.