Thread Locks

Thread locks are a special kind of spin lock that are used to lock a thread for purposes of changing thread state. Thread lock hold events are available as spin lock hold-event probes (that is, spin-acquire and spin-release), but contention events have their own probe specific to thread locks. The thread lock hold-event probe is in Table 18–3.

Table 18.3. Thread Lock Probe

thread-spin

Contention-event probe that fires after a thread has spun on a thread lock. Like other contention-event probes, if both the contention-event probe and the hold-event probe are enabled, thread-spin will fire before spin-acquire. Unlike other contention-event probes, however, thread-spin fires before the lock is actually acquired. As a result, multiple thread-spin probe firings may correspond to a single spin-acquire probe firing.