Why can't you sleep while holding spinlock?

Question

In the linux kernel, why can\'t you sleep while holding a spinlock?

Answer 1

Apart from what willtate has mentioned, assume that a process sleeps while holding a spilock. If the new process that is scheduled tries to acquire the same spinlock, it starts spinning for the lock to be available. Since the new process keeps spinning, it is not possible to schedule the first process and thus the lock is never released making the second process to spin for ever and we have a deadlock.