Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: We study the formal semantics of non-volatile memory in the x86-TSO architecture. We show that while the explicit persist operations in the recent model of Raad et al. from POPL'20 only enforce order between writes to the non-volatile memory, it is equivalent, in terms of reachable states, to a model whose explicit persist operations mandate that prior writes are actually written to the non-volatile memory. The latter provides a novel model that is much closer to common developers' understanding of persistency semantics. We further introduce a simpler and stronger sequentially consistent persistency model, develop a sound mapping from this model to x86, and establish a data-race-freedom guarantee providing programmers with a safe programming discipline. Our operational models are accompanied with equivalent declarative formulations, which facilitate our formal arguments, and may prove useful for program verification under x86 persistency.
DOI: 10.1145/3434328
Authors: Artem Khyzha, Ori Lahav
Institution: Tel Aviv University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Israel Science Foundation
Awards: G4032275126, G8684135863
OpenAlex ID: W3093610203