Associating such a thing with spinlocks seems certain to be a dead loss, as the amount of time we normally hold a spinlock is much less than the time to make one kernel call, let alone two.
Yeah, I was thinking about this. ISTM the only way that Sun would bother to provide an API like this is if it had significantly less overhead than a standard system call. Anyway, I'll take a closer look.
On the count-the-number-of-CPUs patch, what sort of coverage are you expecting to get?
I haven't yet seen a platform that doesn't provide some means to get the # of CPUs, but I suppose there might be one...
-Neil
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