In some cases, you may want to perform a short operation (such as incrementing a variable) with the guarantee that the operation will perform atomically—i.e., the operation won't be preempted by another thread or ISR (Interrupt Service Routine).
The QNX Neutrino RTOS provides atomic operations for:
These atomic operations are available by including the C header file <atomic.h>.
Although you can use these atomic operations just about anywhere, you'll find them particularly useful in these two cases:
Since an ISR can preempt a thread at any given point, the only way that the thread would be able to protect itself would be to disable interrupts. Since you should avoid disabling interrupts in a realtime system, we recommend that you use the atomic operations provided with QNX Neutrino.
On an SMP system, multiple threads can and do run concurrently. Again, we run into the same situation as with interrupts above—you should use the atomic operations where applicable to eliminate the need to disable and reenable interrupts.