On 4 March 2014 12:52, Stuart Stevenson <[email protected]> wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>   It would help me understand and follow some of the current threads if I
> knew the definition of atomic as used in this context.


It refers to the original meaning of "atomic", "can not be cut".

Unless steps are taken to prevent it, it would be possible for the base
thread to interrupt the servo thread while it was half-way through writing
a new value to a variable, the value read from memory would be some bytes
from the new number combined with some bytes from the old number. The value
read would potentially be completely wrong.

The problem is slightly more complicated here, as we need to make sure that
complete sets of numbers that are related to each other are written as-one
with no danger of an interrupting thread reading a bad combination.

-- 
atp
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