On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Satyam Sharma wrote:

But if people do seem to have a mixed / confused notion of atomicity
and barriers, and if there's consensus, then as I'd said earlier, I
have no issues in going with the consensus (eg. having API variants).
Linus would be more difficult to convince, however, I suspect :-)

The confusion may be the result of us having barrier semantics in 
atomic_read. If we take that out then we may avoid future confusions.