Henrik Johnson wrote:

> Ok, then I have no problem whatsoever with it. Never heard of 
> spinlocks except in connection with the Linux kernel and have 
> absolutely no idea of how they differ from Mutexes (They seem to 
> perform the same thing). 

A spinlock is a while( 1 ) loop eating CPU cycles while mutexes provided 
by the OS usually are implemented via the scheduling algorithm.

Greetings,
Matthias