The first thing I knew about ARM processor is that, in Glibc, they don't support atomic machine instructions, relying on the Linux scheduler to grant atomic uniprocessor access in order to implement a somewhat atomic compare-and-swap operation. However, it does mention that, the new ARMv6 specification has ldrex/strex (load-exclusive and store-exclusive) instructions.
Some notes about ARM lineage from the ARMv6 whitepaper: ARM10 processor implements ARMv5 specification (1996-), which is uniprocessor only). ARMv6 (2000-) adds shared-memory multi-processor support that is implemented by ARM11 family of processors (2002-).
The ldrex and strex instructions are no different than load-link/store-conditional, a primitive form of hardware transactional memory. They can be used to implement compare and swap.
Although Glibc doesn't support ldrex/strex, the Linux kernel apparently does.
I am interested in compare and swap implementation in ARM because it is a fundamental building block for scalable shared memory multi-processor programming, used by software to implement non-blocking algorithms. If ARM wants to invade the server space by offering low energy usage data centers, they would have to do that.
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