Comment by horizion2025

My concurrency knowledge is a bit rusty but aren't spinlocks only supposed to be used for very brief waits like in the hundreds of cycles (or situations where you can't block... like internal o/s scheduling structures in SMP setups)? If so how much does all this back off and starvation of higher priority threads even matter? If it is longer then you should use a locking primitive (except for in those low level os structures!) where most of the things discussed are not an issue. Would love to hear the use cases where spin locks are needed in eg user space, I dont doubt they occur.