c - UNIX Portable Atomic Operations

Question

Is there a (POSIX-)portable way in C for atomic variable operations similar to a portable threading with pthread?

Atomic operations are operations like "increment and get" that are executed atomically that means that no context switch can interfere with the operation. In Linux kernel space, we have to atomic_t type, in Java we have the java.util.concurrent.atomic package.

On Linux, the atomic.h file provides atomic operations, but the include is platform dependent e.g. #include <asm-x86_64/atomic.h> and it is not available on Mac OS X in a similar way.

Answer 1

For anyone who stumbles upon this in the future, C11 atomics are the best way to do this now - I believe they will be included in GCC 4.9.