B.3.5 Example Usage

A spinlock named mutex may be used to protect a variable counter as follows:



spin_lock(&mutex);
counter++;
spin_unlock(&mutex);


Quick Quiz B.2: What problems could occur if the variable counter were incremented without the protection of mutex? End Quick Quiz

However, the spin_lock() and spin_unlock() primitives do have performance consequences, as will be seen in Section [*].



Paul E. McKenney 2011-12-16