Question about Atomic operations

[Devesh Sharma]

Hello Arjan and list,

The documentation related to atomic operations says that the following
functions should be called in SMP safe maner

void atomic_add(int i, atomic_t *v);
void atomic_sub(int i, atomic_t *v);
void atomic_inc(atomic_t *v);
void atomic_dec(atomic_t *v);

since the implementation of these functions are prefixed with LOCK
prefix (On i386 arch.) which either asserts LOCK# signal or performs
cache locking which gauarentees coherency.

Then why these functions should be called in SMP safe manner?
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