Don't sit on the fence: A static analysis approach to automatic fence insertion

ABSTRACT. Modern architectures rely on memory fences to prevent undesired weakenings of memory consistency. As the fences' semantics may be subtle, the automation of their placement is highly desirable. But precise methods restoring consistency do not scale to deployed systems code. We choose to trade some precision for genuine scalability: we present a novel technique suitable for large code bases. We implement this method in our new musketeer tool, and detail experiments on more than 350 executables of packages found in a Debian Linux distribution, e.g. memcached (about 10000 LoC).