no one can stop my spin!! "spinlock"

a spinlock is a lock where the thread simply waits in a loop (“spins”) repeatedly checking until the lock becomes available. As the thread remains active but isn’t performing a useful task, the use of such a lock is a kind of busy waiting. Once acquired, spinlocks will usually be held until they are explicitly released, although in some implementations they may be automatically released if the thread being waited on (that which holds the lock) blocks, or “goes to sleep”.

Spinlocks are efficient if threads are only likely to be blocked for a short period of time, as they avoid overhead from operating system process re-scheduling or context switching. For this reason, spinlocks are often used inside operating system kernels. However, spinlocks become wasteful if held for longer durations, both preventing other threads from running and requiring re-scheduling. The longer a lock is held by a thread, the greater the risk that it will be interrupted by the O/S scheduler while holding the lock. If this happens, other threads will be left “spinning” (repeatedly trying to acquire the lock), while the thread holding the lock is not making progress towards releasing it. The result is a semi-deadlock until the thread holding the lock can finish and release it. This is especially true on a single-processor system, where each waiting thread of the same priority is likely to waste its quantum (allocated time where a thread can run) spinning until the thread that holds the lock is finally finished.

Implementing spin locks correctly is difficult because one must take into account the possibility of simultaneous access to the lock to prevent race conditions. Generally this is only possible with special machine language instructions, such as atomic test-and-set operations, and cannot be easily implemented in high-level programming languages or those languages which don’t support truly atomic operations.[1] On architectures without such operations, or if high-level language implementation is required, a non-atomic locking algorithm may be used, e.g. Peterson’s algorithm. But note that such an implementation may require more memory than a spinlock, be slower to allow progress after unlocking, and may not be implementable in a high-level language if out-of-order execution is allowed.

this basic sample code with assember

lock:                       # The lock variable. 1 = locked, 0 = unlocked.
    dd      0

    mov     eax, 1          # Set the EAX register to 1.

    xchg    eax, [lock]     # Atomically swap the EAX register with
                            #  the lock variable.
                            # This will always store 1 to the lock, leaving
                            #  previous value in the EAX register.

    test    eax, eax        # Test EAX with itself. Among other things, this will
                            #  set the processor's Zero Flag if EAX is 0.
                            # If EAX is 0, then the lock was unlocked and
                            #  we just locked it.
                            # Otherwise, EAX is 1 and we didn't acquire the lock.

    jnz     loop            # Jump back to the XCHG instruction if the Zero Flag is
                            #  not set, the lock was locked, and we need to spin.

    ret                     # The lock has been acquired, return to the calling
                            #  function.

    mov     eax, 0          # Set the EAX register to 0.

                            #  the lock variable.

    ret                     # The lock has been released.
no one can stop my spin!! "spinlock"

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