Published at LXer:

"People who think'volatile' really matters are just fooling themselves," Linus Torvalds quipped during a lengthy discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list. The thread began with a series of patches to"makeatomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures" which included"removing thevolatile keyword from allatomic_t andatomic64_t definitions that currently have it, and instead explicitly [casting] the variable asvolatile inatomic_read()."Earlier in the discussion Linus had suggested that while it didn't actually fix any bugs it did help hide bugs and make them less likely to be triggered.

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