Synchronising activities of various components in a distributed system

Abstract

The initiator device receives requests from and issues transaction requests to a recipient device via an interconnect. A barrier generator generates barrier transaction requests indicating to the interconnect that an ordering of some transaction requests within a stream of transaction requests passing through the interconnect should be maintained by not allowing reordering of some of the transaction requests that occur before the barrier transaction request in the stream of transaction requests with respect to the barrier transaction request. In response to a synchronize request querying progress of a subset of transaction requests, the initiator device actions any pending transaction requests within the subset of transaction request and the barrier generator generates and issues a barrier transaction request to the interconnect. In response to receiving a response to the barrier transaction request, the initiator device issues an acknowledge signal as a response to the synchronize request.