Currently the code tries up to spin_retry times to grab a lock using the cs
instruction. The cs instruction has exclusive access to a memory region
and therefore invalidates the appropiate cache line of all other cpus. If
there is contention on a lock this leads to cache line trashing. This can
be avoided if we first check wether a cs instruction is likely to succeed
before the instruction gets actually executed.
Signed-off-by: Christian Ehrhardt <ehrhardt@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Christian Ehrhardt
96567161de