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Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:48:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
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To: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
cc: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/24] make atomic_read() behave consistently across all
 architectures
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On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Paul Mackerras wrote:

> 
> It seems that there could be a lot of places where atomic_t is used in
> a non-atomic fashion, and that those uses are either buggy, or there
> is some lock held at the time which guarantees that other CPUs aren't
> changing the value.  In both cases there is no point in using
> atomic_t; we might as well just use an ordinary int.

The point of atomic_t is to do atomic *changes* to the variable.
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