d _raw_write_trylock in kernel/spinlock.c. If the lock could not be taken cpu_relax is called. A directed yield is not possible because cpu_relax doesn't know anything about the lock. To be able to yield the lock in favour of the current lock holder variants of cpu_relax for spinlocks and rw-locks are needed. The new _raw_spin_relax, _raw_read_relax and _raw_write_relax primitives differ from cpu_relax insofar that they have an argument: a pointer to the lock structure. Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Paul Mackerras Cc: Haavard Skinnemoen Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds x,4x