Atomic operation: Difference between revisions

An '''atomic operation''' is an operation that will always be executed without any other process being able to read or change state that is read or changed during the operation. It is effectively executed as a single step, and is an important quality in a number of algorithms that deal with multiple indepentindependent processes, both in synchronization and algorithms that update shared data without requiring synchronization.

A few of the [[Synchronization Primitives]] (sub)pages have implementations or examples of atomic operations. Besides that, GCC can make your life easier because it has built-in functions for them. You can take a look at the [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.4.1/gcc/Atomic-Builtins.html GCC Documentation] (the link is GCC 4.4.1 specific, but it shouldn't be hard to find the docs matching the version number of your GCC).