AFAICS the "adaptive mutexes" patch went into 2.6.30 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/325921/ ). Well, sleeping spinlock, spinning mutex, adaptive mutex, or whatever you want to call it.
Or did you mean the part of the -rt patch that automagically turns most spinlocks into such adaptive mutexes (w/ PI)? Yeah, that might be more difficult to get into mainline?