ok, it's documented: Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 3A: System Programming Guide, Part 1 9.5.3 MSR Access in x2APIC Mode To allow for efficient access to the APIC registers in x2APIC mode, the serializing semantics of WRMSR are relaxed when writing to the APIC registers. Thus, system software should not use “WRMSR to APIC registers in x2APIC mode” as a serializing instruction. Read and write accesses to the APIC registers will occur in program order. A WRMSR to an APIC register may complete before all preceding stores are globally visible; software can prevent this by inserting a serializing instruction or MFENCE before the WRMSR. Ingo -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html