Preventing overly-optimistic spinning

Do locks get served in a first-come-first-served basis? If so, a single spinner solution would be an advantage, but if not, what you'd be doing is preempting a schedular decision, as a lock might not be passed to the first spinner, but to the one with the highest priority. You wouldn't want the high priority task to sleep because a low priority task started spinning first, and then have to wake the high priority task when the lock becomes available, have the low priority task notice an ownership change and then sleep.

Are there other useful things that can be done while spinning on the processor that add latency to waking up when the lock is gained? Like saving power? Or does switching power states tend to be too hungry an operation in itself? Am just curious as a non-kernel-hacker :-)