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Subject: Re: What does atomic_read actually do?
From: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
To: Joseph Seigh <jseigh_02@xemaps.com>
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Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 20:54:40 +0100
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On Sat, 2004-12-18 at 14:20 -0500, Joseph Seigh wrote:
> I mean atomic in the either old or new sense.  I'm wondering what  
> guarantees
> the atomicity.  Not the C standard.  I can see the gcc compiler uses a MOV
> instruction to load the atomic_t from memory which is guaranteed atomic by
> the architecture if aligned properly.  But gcc does that for any old int
> as far as I can see, so why use atomic_read?

it does so on *x86*.
On other architectures, something else might be needed..

also it makes the api more symetric as well.