On previous versions of the ARM architectures, support for shared memory synchronization was with the read-locked-write operations that swap register contents with memory, the SWP and SWPB instructions. These support basic busy and free semaphore mechanisms. See the ARM Architecture Reference Manual for details of the swap instructions.

ARMv7-A describes support for more comprehensive shared-memory synchronization primitives that scale for multiple-processor system designs. Two sets of instructions are introduced to support multiple-processor and shared-memory inter-process communication:

The exclusive-access instructions rely on the ability to tag a physical address as exclusive-access for a particular processor. This tag is later used to determine if an exclusive store to an address occurs.

For nonshared memory regions, the LDR{B,H,D}EX and STR{B,H,D}EX instructions are presented to the ports as normal LDR or STR. If a processor does an STR on a memory region that it has already marked as exclusive, this does not clear the tag. However, if the region has been marked by another processor, an STR clears the tag.

Other events might cause the tag to be cleared. In particular, for memory regions that are not shared, it is Unpredictable whether a store by another processor to a tagged physical address causes the tag to be cleared.

An external abort on either a load-exclusive or store-exclusive puts the processor into Abort mode.