Satyam Sharma writes:

I can't speak for this particular case, but there could be similar code
examples elsewhere, where we do the atomic ops on an atomic_t object
inside a higher-level locking scheme that would take care of the kind of
problem you're referring to here. It would be useful for such or similar
code if the compiler kept the value of that atomic object in a register.

If there is a higher-level locking scheme then there is no point to
using atomic_t variables.  Atomic_t is specifically for the situation
where multiple CPUs are updating a variable without locking.

Paul.