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<ol class="chapter"><li><a href="../introduction.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">1.</strong> Introduction</a></li><li><a href="../ch00/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.</strong> Ch 0: Development Setup</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.</strong> Ch 1: Hello GBA</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li><a href="../ch01/hello1.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.</strong> hello1</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/volatile.html" class="active"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.2.</strong> Volatile</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/io_registers.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.3.</strong> IO Registers</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/the_display_control_register.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.4.</strong> The Display Control Register</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/video_memory_intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.5.</strong> Video Memory Intro</a></li><li><a href="../ch01/hello2.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.6.</strong> hello2</a></li></ol></li><li><a href="../ch02/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.</strong> Ch 2: User Input</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li><a href="../ch02/the_key_input_register.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.1.</strong> The Key Input Register</a></li><li><a href="../ch02/the_vcount_register.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.2.</strong> The VCount Register</a></li><li><a href="../ch02/light_cycle.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.3.</strong> light_cycle</a></li></ol></li><li><a href="../ch03/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.</strong> Ch 3: Memory and Objects</a></li></ol>
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<a class="header" href="#volatile" id="volatile"><h1>Volatile</h1></a>
<p>Before we focus on what the numbers mean, first let's ask ourselves: Why are we
doing <em>volatile</em> writes? You've probably never used that keywords before at all.
What <em>is</em> volatile anyway?</p>
<p>Well, the optimizer is pretty aggressive, and so it'll skip reads and writes
when it thinks can. Like if you write to a pointer once, and then again a moment
later, and it didn't see any other reads in between, it'll think that it can
just skip doing that first write since it'll get overwritten anyway. Sometimes
that's correct, but sometimes it's not.</p>
<p>Marking a read or write as <em>volatile</em> tells the compiler that it really must do
that action, and in the exact order that we wrote it out. It says that there
might even be special hardware side effects going on that the compiler isn't
aware of. In this case, the write to the display control register sets a video
mode, and the writes to the Video RAM set pixels that will show up on the
screen.</p>
<p>Similar to &quot;atomic&quot; operations you might have heard about, all volatile
operations are enforced to happen in the exact order that you specify them, but
only relative to other volatile operations. So something like</p>
<pre><pre class="playpen"><code class="language-rust">
# #![allow(unused_variables)]
#fn main() {
c.volatile_write(5);
a += b;
d.volatile_write(7);
#}</code></pre></pre>
<p>might end up changing <code>a</code> either before or after the change to <code>c</code> (since the
value of <code>a</code> doesn't affect the write to <code>c</code>), but the write to <code>d</code> will
<em>always</em> happen after the write to <code>c</code>, even though the compiler doesn't see any
direct data dependency there.</p>
<p>If you ever go on to use volatile stuff on other platforms it's important to
note that volatile doesn't make things thread-safe, you still need atomic for
that. However, the GBA doesn't have threads, so we don't have to worry about
those sorts of thread safety concerns (there's interrupts, but that's another
matter).</p>
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