process sychronization

Question

What is spinlock?

What are the advantages of having spinlock?

Comments

If a process is in critical section another process cannot enter critical section.

So, it spins while waiting for lock called 'spinlock'

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@srestha like in Priority inversion Problem

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@srestha...so every busy waiting is spinlock???

I think spinlock is a kind of deadlock in which processes are in running state.

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mcjoshi why priority inversion?

vaishali busy waiting not causing deadlock . Spinlock just a alter process of context switch I think.

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@srestha...So it is a kind of context switch which can occur in any kind of multi-programming environment?

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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1957398/what-exactly-are-spin-locks

Answer 1

suppose in TSl if a process is inside the critical section....and suddenly a process with higher priority arrives and wants to access the CS....now since CPU will be alloted to that process but it wont be able to enter inside the CS as one process is still there...and that inside process wont able to move out as there is no CPU available for it...this is called priority inversion problem or SPIN LOCK...its a kind of deadloack u can say;;