Partial Store Ordering (PSO)

PSO does not guarantee that the sequence in which store, FLUSH, and atomic load-store instructions appear in memory for a given processor is identical to the sequence in which they were issued by the processor. The processor can reorder the stores so that the sequence of stores to memory is not the same as the sequence of stores issued by the CPU.

SPARC processors support PSO; IA processors do not.

For SPARC processors, conformance between issuing order and memory order is provided by the system framework using the STBAR instruction: if two of the above instructions are separated by an STBAR in the issuing order of a processor, or if they reference the same location, the memory order of the two instructions is the same as the issuing order. Note that enforcement of strong data ordering in DDI-compliant drivers is provided by the ddi_regs_map_setup(9F) interface. Compliant drivers cannot use the STBAR instruction directly.

See the SPARC Architecture Manual, Version 9, for more details on the SPARC memory model.