Michael Tsai Blog: Beware Spinlocks in User Space

This week, the Michael Tsai Blog (a great source of interesting system software discussions) summarized a discussion thread between Malte Skarupke (a game developer) and Linus Torvalds about different kinds of locking primitives.

See Beware Spinlocks in User Space for Tsai's summary.

If you find that interesting, I strongly recommend also reading the original article (Measuring Mutexes, Spinlocks and how Bad the Linux Scheduler Really is) and the discussion thread (on Real World Technologies forum). Although there is a bit of trolling, the discussion has a very high signal-to-noise ratio, including some very good points by Linus Torvalds about why it is incredibly difficult to roll your own locking primitives and not screw it up.