ITPUB

Sep 12, 2016 · Fundamentals

How Linux Guarantees Atomic Operations on ARM: Inside LDREX/STREX Mechanism

This article examines the Linux kernel’s implementation of atomic variables on ARM architectures, detailing how the LDREX and STREX instructions provide atomicity in both UP and SMP systems, analyzing source code from arch/arm/include/asm/atomic.h, and illustrating various concurrency scenarios with diagrams and step‑by‑step explanations.