POSTER: Efficient self-invalidation/self-downgrade for critical sections with relaxed semantics

Cache coherence protocols based on self-invalidation allow simpler hardware implementation compared to traditional write-invalidation protocols, by relying on data-race-free semantics and applying self-invalidation and self-downgrade on synchronization points. This work examines how self-invalidation and self-downgrade are performed in relation to atomicity and ordering and shows that they do not need to be applied conservatively, as so far implemented. Our key observation is that, often, critical sections which are not ordered in time, are intended to provide only atomicity but not thread synchronization.