> By the way, there are several sites where the use of > atomic_t/atomic_wrap_t as a counter ventures beyond the standard (inc, > dec, add, sub, read, set) operations we're planning on implementing > for both refcount_t and stats_t.
Speaking of non-fitting patterns. This one is quite common in networking code for refcounters: if (atomic_cmpxchg(&cur->refcnt, 1, 0) == 1) {} This is from net/netfilter/nfnetlink_acct.c, but there are similar ones in other places. Also, simple atomic_dec() is used pretty much everywhere for counters, which we don’t have a straight match in refcount_t API.