Re: [BUGS] BUG #2401: spinlocks not available on amd64

Theo Schlossnagle <jesus(at)omniti(dot)com> writes:
> I'd remind everyone that the spinlock stuff is entirely optional at
> build time.

Not really. The performance hit for not having hardware spinlocks is
so severe that it's not considered a reasonable fallback.

> I also think it immensely useful to replace all of the tas subsystem
> with cas so that one could reliabily lock these atomics with the process
> id of the locker.

I cannot, ever once in my years working on Postgres, remember having
wanted such a thing. I am strongly against mucking with the spinlock
code for mere aesthetics --- it's too fragile and hard to test,
especially on platforms you don't have ready access to.

In short, it ain't broken and we don't need to fix it.

regards, tom lane