Re: [PATCH 1/3] drivers: misc: add omap_hwspinlock driver

From: Ohad Ben-Cohen
Date: Tue Oct 19 2010 - 17:58:00 EST


On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> If a hwspinlock is taken over a long period of time, its other user
>> (with which we try to achieve synchronization) might be polling the
>> OMAP interconnect for too long (trying to take the hwspinlock) and
>> thus preventing it to be used for other transactions.
>
> This sounds exactly like any other spinlock.

The difference is hardware-specific: the hwspinlock device is located
on the OMAP's L4 interconnect where access is slow, wasteful of power,
and spinning on it may prevent other peripherals from interconnecting.
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