7
Spin Locks and Contention
When writing programs for uniprocessors, it is usually safe to ignore the underlying system’s architectural details. Unfortunately, multiprocessor programming has yet to reach that state, and for the time being, it is crucial to understand the underlying machine architecture. The goal of this chapter is to understand how architecture affects performance, and how to exploit this knowledge to write efficient concurrent programs. We revisit the familiar mutual exclusion problem, this time with the aim of devising mutual exclusion protocols that work well with today’s multiprocessors.
Any mutual exclusion protocol poses the question: what do you do if you cannot acquire the lock? There are two alternatives. If you keep ...
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