spinlock

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Definition of spinlock in English English dictionary

Any of a family of lock types characterized by continuously polling to see if a lock is available, rather than putting the waiting thread to sleep

A busy-wait method of ensuring mutual exclusion for a resource Tasks waiting on a spin-lock sit in a busy loop until the spinlock becomes available On a UP (single processor) system, spinlocks are not used and are optimised out of the kernel There are also read-write spinlocks, where multiple readers are allowed, but only one writer See Documentation/spinlocks txt in the kernel source for details