Patent ID: 7581067

Claim:
A method for performing cacheline polling in a data processing system, said method comprising: requesting an action by a first process to be performed by a second process; issuing a conditional load operation by said first process to determine whether or not said requested action has been completed by said second process, wherein said conditional load operation comprises instructions for: setting a first value of a buffer flag in a memory location, said first value indicating that the second process has not completed the requested action; setting a first reservation status in a register of a cache of said data processing system, said first reservation status corresponding to said first value of the buffer flag; changing the first reservation status to a second reservation status in response to the second process changing the first value of the buffer flag to a second value of the buffer flag, said second value indicating that the second process has completed the requested action; and stalling said conditional load operation until said first reservation status has changed to the second reservation status, wherein said stalling comprises (a) cessation of execution of instructions by a processor in a singly-threaded uni- or multi-processor system, or (b) cessation of execution of instructions by an associated thread in a multi-threaded processor system.