This was my impression, and why I called it "wasting" a syscall.
On architectures where syscall numbers or handles are unlimited, of
course there is no reason to keep it to one syscall.
> One thing to consider is that many don't want to use libraries.
> They want to inline, which would result only in a few instruction.
Inlined you only take the penalty from the argument pushes. You
still have to go through the motions of checking whether you can
get/release the lock in userspace.
> What I would like to see is an interface that lets me pass optional
> parameters to the syscall interface, so I can call with different number
> of parameters.
Is this to lock multiple futexes "atomically"? If we are
looking for a fast path stack-wise, this seems extra work.
Joel
--"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." - Thomas Jones
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