Labs

Measuring Spin-Locks

Inspired by work of Thomas Friebel on Lock-Holder Preemption we did some experiments with the Windows Research Kernel:

• How can we measure the time a thread is spinning while waiting for a spin-lock?
• Does lock-holder-preemption occur on Windows systems (using VMware Workstation)?

Unfortunately, we could not boot the WRK with Xen. Therefore, the results of our initial experiments which are described in this post can not be compared directly to the work done by Thomas Friebel in the Linux/Xen environment.

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