fence

RISC-V Assembly Reference

lyszt.net covers fence and other RISC-V instructions in more detail.

Description

FENCE instructions are used to order device I/O and memory accesses as viewed by other RISC-V harts and external devices or coprocessors. Any combination of device input (I), device output (O), memory reads (R), and memory writes (W) may be ordered with respect to any combination of the same. Informally, no other RISC-V hart or external device can observe any operation in the successor set following a FENCE before any operation in the predecessor set preceding the FENCE. memorymodel provides a precise description of the RISC-V memory consistency model.

FENCE instructions also order memory reads and writes made by the hart as observed by memory reads and writes made by an external device. However, FENCE instructions do not order observations of events made by an external device using any other signaling mechanism.

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A device might observe an access to a memory location via some external communication mechanism, e.g., a memory-mapped control register that drives an interrupt signal to an interrupt controller. This communication is outside the scope of the FENCE ordering mechanism and hence FENCE instructions can provide no guarantee on when a change in the interrupt signal is visible to the interrupt controller. Specific devices might provide additional ordering guarantees to reduce software overhead but those are outside the scope of the RISC-V memory model.

The EEI will define what I/O operations are possible, and in particular, which memory addresses when accessed by load and store instructions will be treated and ordered as device input and device output operations respectively rather than memory reads and writes. For example, memory-mapped I/O devices will typically be accessed with uncached loads and stores that are ordered using the I and O bits rather than the R and W bits. Instruction-set extensions might also describe new I/O instructions that will also be ordered using the I and O bits in a FENCE instruction.

Fence mode encoding

The FENCE mode field fm defines the semantics of the FENCE instruction. A FENCE (with fm=0000) orders all memory operations in its predecessor set before all memory operations in its successor set.

A FENCE.TSO instruction is encoded as a FENCE instruction with fm=1000, predecessor=RW, and successor=RW. FENCE.TSO orders all load operations in its predecessor set before all memory operations in its successor set, and all store operations in its predecessor set before all store operations in its successor set. This leaves non-AMO store operations in the FENCE.TSO's predecessor set unordered with non-AMO loads in its successor set.

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Because FENCE RW,RW imposes a superset of the orderings that FENCE.TSO imposes, it is correct to ignore the fm field and implement FENCE.TSO as FENCE RW,RW.

The unused fields in the FENCE instructions--rs1 and rd--are reserved for finer-grain fences in future extensions. For forward compatibility, base implementations shall ignore these fields#, and standard software shall zero these fields. Likewise, many fm and predecessor/successor set settings are also reserved for future use. Base implementations shall treat all such reserved configurations as FENCE instructions (with fm=0000), and standard software shall use only non-reserved configurations.

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We chose a relaxed memory model to allow high performance from simple machine implementations and from likely future coprocessor or accelerator extensions. We separate out I/O ordering from memory R/W ordering to avoid unnecessary serialization within a device-driver hart and also to support alternative non-memory paths to control added coprocessors or I/O devices. Simple implementations may additionally ignore the predecessor and successor fields and always execute a conservative FENCE on all operations.

References

[1]RISC-V International. The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual, Volume I: Unprivileged Architecture. Version 20260120. Section 2.7, Memory Ordering Instructions, page 35.

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