While playing with MySQL 5.7.5 on POWER8, I came across a rather interesting bug (74775 – and this is not the only one… I think I have a decent amount of auditing and patching to do now) which made me want to write a bit on memory barriers and the volatile keyword.

Memory barriers are hard.

Like, super hard. It’s the kind of thing that makes you curse hardware designers, probably because they’re not magically solving all your problems for you. Basically, as you get more CPU cores and each of them have caches, it gets more expensive to keep everything in sync. It’s quite obvious that with *ahem* an eventually consistent model, you could save a bunch of time and effort at the expense of shifting some complexity into software.

Those in the MySQL world should recognize this – we’ve been dealing with asynchronous replication for well over a decade …