Reconciling Event Structures with Modern Multiprocessors

Abstract

Weakestmo is a recently proposed memory consistency model that uses event structures to resolve the infamous "out-of-thin-air" problem. Although it has been shown to have important benefits over other memory models, its established compilation schemes are suboptimal in that they add more fences than necessary. In this paper, we prove the correctness in Coq of the intended compilation schemes for Weakestmo to a range of hardware memory models (x86, POWER, ARMv7, ARMv8, RISC-V). Our proof is the first that establishes correctness of compilation of an event-structure-based model that forbids "thin-air" behaviors, as well as the first mechanized compilation proof of a weak memory model supporting sequentially consistent accesses to such a range of hardware platforms. Our compilation proof goes via the recent Intermediate Memory Model (IMM), which we suitably extend with sequentially consistent accesses.