[$] MCS locks and qspinlocks
Impressive amounts of effort have gone into optimizing the kernel's low-level locking mechanisms over the years, but that does not mean that there is no room for improving their performance further. Some work that will be in the 3.14 3.15 kernel, with more likely to come later, has the potential to speed up kernel locking considerably, especially in situations where there are significant amounts of contention.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from this week's Kernel Page.