Fastest inline-assembly spinlock

Question

I\'m writing a multithreaded application in c++, where performance is critical. I need to use a lot of locking while copying small structures between threads, for this I hav

Answer 1

Just look here: x86 spinlock using cmpxchg

And thanks to Cory Nelson

__asm{
spin_lock:
xorl %ecx, %ecx
incl %ecx
spin_lock_retry:
xorl %eax, %eax
lock; cmpxchgl %ecx, (lock_addr)
jnz spin_lock_retry
ret

spin_unlock:
movl $0 (lock_addr)
ret
}

And another source says: http://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/cpu/cx8.htm

       lock    cmpxchg8b qword ptr [esi]
is replaceable with the following sequence

try:
        lock    bts dword ptr [edi],0
        jnb     acquired
wait:
        test    dword ptr [edi],1
        je      try
        pause                   ; if available
        jmp     wait

acquired:
        cmp     eax,[esi]
        jne     fail
        cmp     edx,[esi+4]
        je      exchange

fail:
        mov     eax,[esi]
        mov     edx,[esi+4]
        jmp     done

exchange:
        mov     [esi],ebx
        mov     [esi+4],ecx

done:
        mov     byte ptr [edi],0

And here is a discussion about lock-free vs lock implementations: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.programming.threads/2011-10/msg00009.html