This document provides background reading for memory models and related tools. These documents are aimed at kernel hackers who are interested in memory models. Hardware manuals and models =========================== o SPARC International Inc. (Ed.). 1994. "The SPARC Architecture Reference Manual Version 9". SPARC International Inc. o Compaq Computer Corporation (Ed.). 2002. "Alpha Architecture Reference Manual". Compaq Computer Corporation. o Intel Corporation (Ed.). 2002. "A Formal Specification of Intel Itanium Processor Family Memory Ordering". Intel Corporation. o Intel Corporation (Ed.). 2002. "Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual". Intel Corporation. o Peter Sewell, Susmit Sarkar, Scott Owens, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, and Magnus O. Myreen. 2010. "x86-TSO: A Rigorous and Usable Programmer's Model for x86 Multiprocessors". Commun. ACM 53, 7 (July, 2010), 89-97. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1785414.1785443 o IBM Corporation (Ed.). 2009. "Power ISA Version 2.06". IBM Corporation. o ARM Ltd. (Ed.). 2009. "ARM Barrier Litmus Tests and Cookbook". ARM Ltd. o Susmit Sarkar, Peter Sewell, Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, and Derek Williams. 2011. "Understanding POWER Multiprocessors". In Proceedings of the 32Nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 175–186. o Susmit Sarkar, Kayvan Memarian, Scott Owens, Mark Batty, Peter Sewell, Luc Maranget, Jade Alglave, and Derek Williams. 2012. "Synchronising C/C++ and POWER". In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 311-322. o ARM Ltd. (Ed.). 2014. "ARM Architecture Reference Manual (ARMv8, for ARMv8-A architecture profile)". ARM Ltd. o Imagination Technologies, LTD. 2015. "MIPS(R) Architecture For Programmers, Volume II-A: The MIPS64(R) Instruction, Set Reference Manual". Imagination Technologies, LTD. https://imgtec.com/?do-download=4302. o Shaked Flur, Kathryn E. Gray, Christopher Pulte, Susmit Sarkar, Ali Sezgin, Luc Maranget, Will Deacon, and Peter Sewell. 2016. "Modelling the ARMv8 Architecture, Operationally: Concurrency and ISA". In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 608–621. o Shaked Flur, Susmit Sarkar, Christopher Pulte, Kyndylan Nienhuis, Luc Maranget, Kathryn E. Gray, Ali Sezgin, Mark Batty, and Peter Sewell. 2017. "Mixed-size Concurrency: ARM, POWER, C/C++11, and SC". In Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 429–442. o Christopher Pulte, Shaked Flur, Will Deacon, Jon French, Susmit Sarkar, and Peter Sewell. 2018. "Simplifying ARM concurrency: multicopy-atomic axiomatic and operational models for ARMv8". In Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 2, Issue POPL, Article No. 19. ACM, New York, NY, USA. Linux-kernel memory model ========================= o Jade Alglave, Will Deacon, Boqun Feng, David Howells, Daniel Lustig, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, Nicholas Piggin, Alan Stern, Akira Yokosawa, and Peter Zijlstra. 2019. "Calibrating your fear of big bad optimizing compilers" Linux Weekly News. https://lwn.net/Articles/799218/ o Jade Alglave, Will Deacon, Boqun Feng, David Howells, Daniel Lustig, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, Nicholas Piggin, Alan Stern, Akira Yokosawa, and Peter Zijlstra. 2019. "Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?" Linux Weekly News. https://lwn.net/Articles/793253/ o Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, and Alan Stern. 2018. "Frightening small children and disconcerting grown-ups: Concurrency in the Linux kernel". In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 405-418. Webpage: http://diy.inria.fr/linux/. o Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, and Alan Stern. 2017. "A formal kernel memory-ordering model (part 1)" Linux Weekly News. https://lwn.net/Articles/718628/ o Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, and Alan Stern. 2017. "A formal kernel memory-ordering model (part 2)" Linux Weekly News. https://lwn.net/Articles/720550/ o Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, and Alan Stern. 2017-2019. "A Formal Model of Linux-Kernel Memory Ordering" (backup material for the LWN articles) https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/LWNLinuxMM/ Memory-model tooling ==================== o Daniel Jackson. 2002. "Alloy: A Lightweight Object Modelling Notation". ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 11, 2 (April 2002), 256–290. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/505145.505149 o Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, and Michael Tautschnig. 2014. "Herding Cats: Modelling, Simulation, Testing, and Data Mining for Weak Memory". ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 36, 2, Article 7 (July 2014), 7:1–7:74 pages. o Jade Alglave, Patrick Cousot, and Luc Maranget. 2016. "Syntax and semantics of the weak consistency model specification language cat". CoRR abs/1608.07531 (2016). https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07531 Memory-model comparisons ======================== o Paul E. McKenney, Ulrich Weigand, Andrea Parri, and Boqun Feng. 2018. "Linux-Kernel Memory Model". (27 September 2018). http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0124r6.html.