[MUD-Dev] Re: atomic functions

[Joel Dillon <emily#cornholio,new.ox.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 5 May 1998, Felix A. Croes wrote:

> Jon A. Lambert <jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com> wrote:
> >[...]
> > Trivia note: My terminology "spin-lock" comes from IBM's MVS/ESA 
> >      architecture.  MVS uses spin-locking in its page locking scheme 
> >      to implement shared memory.  

  I was under the impression that a spinlock (from Posix threads/parallel
processing terminology) was a mutex which was locked by repeatedly trying
to grab the mutex for a short period of time (useful only on parallel
processing machines where grabbing a new processor outweighs the extra
CPU cycles expended on the old one).

	Jo



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