Comment by saagarjha
7 hours ago
> The reason for the hack is that very early C compilers just always spill, so you can write MMIO driver code by setting a pointer to point at the MMIO hardware and it actually works because every time you change x the CPU instruction performs a memory write.
Source?
This is one of those "everyone doing this kind of work knows" that's rather hard to source, but: this is basically the point of volatile. Especially for reads rather than writes, where you may want to read some location that is being written into by a different piece of hardware.
People used to use it for thread synchronization before proper memory barrier primitives (see https://mariadb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2017-11-Memor... ) were available. It was not entirely reliable for this purpose.
Source for what? The volatile keyword is explicitly telling the compiler "don't optimize read/write to this memory location". That's the whole point. Its use for manipulating hardware registers is covered in any intro embedded systems course. I don't know the history of C compilers but it would seem reasonable to assume that compilers started out plainly translating the C to machine code. Optimization would have happened later as the compilers became more mature.
https://www.gnu.org/software/c-intro-and-ref/manual/html_nod...