[zaarn]

Being owned and unsafe feels like the most natural fit. If multiple threads (or the interrupt handler) manipulate a register while you're already working on it could leave you in a very undefined state you have no idea about. In this case, rust makes you promise that you checked that this will be entirely safe.

You could also write wrappers, for example one that automatically turns off interrupt when you do a write operation or gives you a guard that lets you write and read the register, which turns off interrupts until the guard is dropped. Or one that has a lock or uses atomics. Plenty of options you can use here.

[crest]

On ARM v7m the "correct" way to would be to raise the current thread's BASEPRI the the highest exception priority you have to lock up. The M0+ cores on the RP2040 only support v6m and require masking those interrupts, but since M0+ cores are limited to the 16 internal exceptions and at most 32 external interrupts the code sequence to temporarily mask those interrupts isn't much longer. The annoying downside is that it forces a tighter coupling on programmers. The RP2040 specifically may offer a cleaner solution if you can afford to dedicate one of the hardware locks available in the single-cycle I/O block to each conflict that requires resolution. Such a solution should even work for both ARM cores.