Is a memory barrier an instruction that the CPU executes, or is it just a marker?

Question

I am trying to understand what is a memory barrier exactly. Based on what I know so far, a memory barrier (for example: mfence) is used to prevent the re-ordering of instructions from before to after and from after to before the memory barrier.

This is an example of a memory barrier in use:

instruction 1 instruction 2 instruction 3 mfence instruction 4 instruction 5 instruction 6 

Now my question is: Is the mfence instruction just a marker telling the CPU in what order to execute the instructions? Or is it an instruction that the CPU actually executes like it executes other instructions (for example: mov).

Answer 1

Every byte sequence that the CPU encounters amongst its code is an instruction that the CPU executes. There are no other kinds of instructions.

You can see this clearly in both the Intel instruction set reference and the specific page for mfence.

MFENCE
Performs a serializing operation on all load-from-memory and store-to-memory instructions that were issued prior the MFENCE instruction. This serializing operation guarantees that every load and store instruction that precedes the MFENCE instruction in program order becomes globally visible before any load or store instruction that follows the MFENCE instruction.

The MFENCE instruction is ordered with respect to all load and store instructions, other MFENCE instructions, any LFENCE and SFENCE instructions, and any serializing instructions (such as the CPUID instruction). MFENCE does not serialize the instruction stream. Weakly ordered memory types can be used to achieve higher processor performance through such techniques as out-of-order issue, speculative reads, write-combining, and write-collapsing. The degree to which a consumer of data recognizes or knows that the data is weakly ordered varies among applications and may be unknown to the producer of this data. The MFENCE instruction provides a performance-efficient way of ensuring load and store ordering between routines that produce weakly-order ed results and routines that consume that data.

Processors are free to fetch and cache data speculatively from regions of system memory that use the WB, WC, and WT memory types. This speculative fetching can occur at any time and is not tied to instruction execution. Thus, it is not ordered with respect to executions of the MFENCE instruction; data can be brought into the caches speculatively just before, during, or after the execution of an MFENCE instruction.

As you can see from the excerpt the MFence instruction does quite a bit of work, rather than just being a marker of some sort.