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

[Ohad Ben-Cohen]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> 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.