Patent ID: 7519967
Filing Date: 2009-04-14
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method for facilitating biased locking of objects within an object-based computing system, comprising: encountering a lock-acquisition operation while executing a current thread, wherein the lock-acquisition operation attempts to acquire a lock for an object; in response to the lock-acquisition operation, examining synchronization information associated with the object, wherein the process of examining the synchronization information does not involve atomic operations; if the synchronization information indicates that the lock is biasable and that the lock is biased toward the current thread, allowing the current thread to acquire the lock without updating the synchronization information; and if the synchronization information indicates that the lock is biasable and that the lock is biased toward another thread revoking the bias toward the other thread by: wherein acquiring the lock for the object without atomic operations reduces the number of hardware operations the current thread needs to execute on the object-based computing system to acquire the lock.