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volatile: A Brief History

To find the roots of volatile, let's go back to the 1970s, when Gordon Bell (of PDP-11 fame) introduced the concept of memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). Before that, processors allocated pins and defined special instructions for performing port I/O. The idea behind MMIO is to use the same pins and instructions for both memory and port access. Hardware outside the processor intercepts specific memory addresses and transforms them into I/O requests; so dealing with ports became simply reading from and writing to machine-specific memory addresses.

What a great idea. Reducing pin count is good—pins slow down signal, increase defect rate, and complicate packaging. Also, MMIO doesn't require special instructions for ports. Programs just use the memory, and the hardware takes care of the rest.

Or almost.

To see why MMIO needs volatile variables, consider the following code:

unsigned int *p = GetMagicAddress();
unsigned int a, b;
a = *p;
b = *p;

If p refers to a port, a and b should receive two consecutive words read from that port. However, if p points to a bona fide memory location, then a and b load the same location twice and, hence, will compare equal. Compilers exploit this assumption in the copy propagation optimization that transforms b=*p; into the more efficient b = a;. Similarly, for the same p, a, and b, consider:

*p = a;
*p = b;

The code writes two words to *p, but the optimizer might assume that *p is memory and perform the dead assignment elimination optimization by eliminating the first assignment.

So, when dealing with ports, some optimizations must be suspended. volatile exists for specifying special treatment for ports, specifically: The content of a volatile variable is unstable (can change by means unknown to the compiler); all writes to volatile data are observable, so they must be executed religiously; and all operations on volatile data are executed in the sequence in which they appear in the source code. The first two rules ensure proper reading and writing. The last one allows implementation of I/O protocols that mix input and output.

This is informally what C and C++'s volatile guarantees. Java took volatile a step further by guaranteeing the aforementioned properties across multiple threads. This was an important step, but it wasn't enough to make volatile usable for thread synchronization: The relative ordering of volatile and nonvolatile operations remained unspecified. This omission forces many variables to be volatile to ensure proper ordering.

Java 1.5's volatile has the more restrictive, but simpler, acquire/release semantics: Any read of a volatile is guaranteed to occur prior to any memory reference (volatile or not) in the statements that follow, and any write to a volatile is guaranteed to occur after all memory references in the statements preceding it. .NET defines volatile to incorporate multithreaded semantics as well, which are similar to the currently proposed Java semantics. We know of no similar work being done on C's or C++'s volatile.

— S.M. and A.A.

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