Re: spin_lock and linux philosophy question...

Momchil Velikov (velco@fadata.bg)
Mon, 13 Sep 1999 16:56:11 +0300


Robert Dinse wrote:
>
> On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Momchil Velikov wrote:
> >
> > Spin locks are for cases when it is expected the lock to be held for
> > very short intervals, thus saving the sleep/wakeup overhead. For other
> > cases there are sleep locks (whatever they are called in each OS), where
> > indeed the CPU is sent to do something else.
> >
> > Regards,
> > -velco
>
> Thank you for the short explanation, and thank you David for the reference
> as I really do want to understand these things.

You can also use a spinlock in an interrupt handler, where you can't sleep at
all.

Regards,
-velco

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