The Semantics of Power and ARM Multiprocessor Machine Code

  • Jade Alglave ,
  • Anthony Fox ,
  • Samin Ishtiaq ,
  • Magnus O. Myreen ,
  • Susmit Sarkar ,
  • Peter Sewell ,
  • Francesco Zappa Nardelli

Workshop on Declarative Aspects of Multicore Programming |

We develop a rigorous semantics for Power and ARM multi-
processor programs, including their relaxed memory model
and the behaviour of reasonable fragments of their instruc-
tion sets. The semantics is mechanised in the HOL proof
assistant.
This should provide a good basis for informal reasoning
and formal verification of low-level code for these weakly
consistent architectures, and, together with our x86 seman-
tics, for the design and compilation of high-level concurrent
languages.