Hand-waving about a phased sleep [LWN.net]

Hand-waving about a phased sleep

Posted Jan 7, 2009 21:29 UTC (Wed) by jlokier (subscriber, #52227)
In reply to: Hand-waving about a phased sleep by BrucePerens
Parent article: Btrfs aims for the mainline

x86 does have a primitive to wait on an address: monitor/mwait.
It waits until the monitored location is modified by another processor.

I read that it's a bit slow for this sort of thing.

In principle, if it were fast (and it could be with MESI caches),
it would be very well suited to replace all spinning waits.

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