Previous | Next --- Slide 9 of 34
Back to Lecture Thumbnails
nkindberg

Here we relax the constraint that writes must complete before subsequent writes.

Previously with only W->R relaxed, we said the program could only print 1. The write to A had to complete before the write to flag, so if P2 observed flag being changed and exited the while loop it must have observed A being written also since that was written before flag. In this case we matched sequential consistency.

With W->W relaxed however, the write to flag might be observed by P2 before it observes the write to A in which case it could exit the while loop and print 0. This no longer matches sequential consistency since in a sequential memory system the write to A must always complete before the write to flag.