Tag
spinlocks
- Aug 31, 2026 Spinlock Contention: Ticket Ordering and MCS Queues Why a test-and-set spinlock makes every waiter hammer one cache line, how a ticket lock restores first-come order, and why a queue of per-thread flags beats both. operating systems
- Feb 17, 2026 Steal Time and vCPU Skew: What Happens When a Guest Gets Fewer Cores Than It Asked For Why a guest cannot see its own descheduling, how paravirtualized steal accounting reports it, and why lock holders that lose the CPU cost far more than the time they lost. virtualization
- May 6, 2025 Atomic Read-Modify-Write and the Mutual Exclusion Problem Why a flag plus a check cannot keep two threads out of the same critical section, and what a single indivisible read-modify-write instruction changes about the problem. operating systems
- Dec 30, 2022 Spinlock Design from Test-and-Set to Ticket Locks How a test-and-set lock starves its waiters, why test-and-test-and-set helps, and how a ticket lock turns a race into a queue without a fairness guarantee. systems programming