raja wrote: > Hi, > I have read in a book that some locking mechanisms put the task sleep > till it aquires lock and some mechanisms simply busy wait. > wht is the basic difference between sleeping and waiting?Is the both > same? nope. "sleeping" implies invoking the scheduler and yielding the CPU to some other task. "busy waiting"/"spinning" means just that: the same task is continuously testing the condition until it succeeds acquiring the lock. both have advantages/disadvantages and restrictions, therefore they are used under (very) different circumstances. refer to a good kernel book for details (LDD3 has already been recommended to you - http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/). -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
