o get the lock in that time, it adds itself to the contention count in the lock and blocks on a per-cpu event channel. When unlocking the spinlock, the locker looks to see if there's anyone blocked waiting for the lock by checking for a non-zero waiter count. If there's a waiter, it traverses the per-cpu "lock_spinners" variable, which contains which lock each CPU is waiting on. It picks one CPU waiting on the lock and sends it an event to wake it up. This allows efficient fast-path spinlock operation, while allowing spinning vcpus to give up their processor time while waiting for a contended lock. [*] 2^16 iterations is threshold at which 98% locks have been taken according to Thomas Friebel's Xen Summit talk "Preventing Guests from Spinning Around". Therefore, we'd expect the lock and unlock slow paths will only be entered 2% of the time. Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Petr Tesarik Cc: Virtualization Cc: Xen devel Cc: Thomas Friebel Cc: Nick Piggin Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar