Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Memory Reply To: Memory

LarryP
Participant
Post count: 78

I’m curious:
How does/will the Mill implement the semantics of C’s volatile qualifier?
From what I’ve gathered from watching the talks, the Mill always loads data from the cache hierarchy, not directly from main memory. However, the data in volatile variables (for example memory-mapped peripheral registers), can change independently of CPU activity, so cached values of volatile variables may well not be correct.

Is there a mechanism, such as designating certain memory regions as non-cacheable, to ensure that the Mill implements the semantics of volatile variables? A forum search turned up a single forum entry that contains the word volatile. In Mr. Godard’s reply #733 in topic “Side channel timing attacks” he writes:

One of those flags is “volatileData”, which forces the request to bypass private caches and go to the top shared cache.

However, going to the top shared cache (instead of to main memory itself) doesn’t appear to implement the semantics of C-language volatile variables. Since the Mill is targeted at existing code bases, which include C and C++, I assume that there is (or will be) a way to preserve the semantics of volatile. If it can be revealed at this point, I’d very much like a confirmation that the Mill will preserve the semantics of the volatile qualifier — and, if possible, how the Mill handles volatile.

Thanks in advance for any reply.