What pitfalls exist when writing reentrant code?
Reentrant code means the ability for a piece of code to be called simultaneously from two or more threads. Attention to re-enterability is needed when using a multi-tasking operating system, or when using interrupts since an interrupt is really a temporary thread. The code generated natively by gcc is reentrant. But, only some of the libraries in avr-libc are explicitly reentrant, and some are known not to be reentrant. In general, any library call that reads and writes global variables (including I/O registers) is not reentrant. This is because more than one thread could read or write the same storage at the same time, unaware that other threads are doing the same, and create inconsistent and/or erroneous results. A library call that is known not to be reentrant will work if it is used only within one thread and no other thread makes use of a library call that shares common storage with it. Below is a table of library calls with known issues.
