volatile

volatile is an ANSI C keyword that is used to prevent the optimizer from removing what it thinks are unnecessary accesses to objects. As an example, if the device has a control register that requires two consecutive writes to get it to take action, the optimizer could decide that the first write is unnecessary since the value is unused if there is no intervening read access.

If a device driver does not use the DDI data access functions to access device registers, device registers should be declared volatile. However, if the DDI data access functions are used to access device registers, it is not necessary to use volatile.

It is not an error to declare a variable volatile unnecessarily, but it might impact performance.