6.826 / Fall 2019

Homework: Reading questions

Submit two items to the submission website (see link in the navigation bar at the top of the page):

Submit your own question about the paper (e.g., what you find most confusing about the paper or the paper's general context/problem), before lecture (i.e., 1pm). You cannot use the question below. To the extent possible, during lecture we will try to answer questions submitted beforehand.

Submit your answer for the question below, before the beginning of the lecture.

Answer the following question:

The x86-TSO model described in the paper provides a memory model for hardware threads (i.e., code running directly on physical CPUs). Applications (user-level software) typically run on top of an OS kernel in threads managed by the OS kernel ("kernel threads"), which are multiplexed by the kernel across the available CPUs (and, in particular, the same kernel thread might run on different hardware threads/CPUs over time).

To what extent does the x86-TSO memory model apply to applicaton software running that uses kernel threads (if at all)?