Spin locks are a tough sell in a preemptable context. Say you have two processes that share some memory location. They both briefly access it for a very short t

Spin locks are a tough sell in a preemptable context. Say you have two processes that share some memory location. They both briefly access it for a very short time, so you protect it with a spin lock. Well, what happens in the case when one of the threads is preempted while holding the lock? The other thread would try to aquire it, and just spin for its entire timeslot. No bueno. When you call spin_lock() in the kernel it actually disables preemption until you call spin_unlock() to avoid this. You can't disable preemption from userspace. There might be a use for a spin lock if you have a process that is SCHED_RR, but I haven't seen it.