Patent ID: 8713262

Claim:
A method for managing a spinlock to indicate exclusive access to a system resource, the method comprising: upon determining that a first processor is attempting to acquire the spinlock, raising an execution priority level associated with the first processor from an initial priority level to a high priority level; configuring a monitor circuit associated with the first processor to monitor a memory address associated with spinlock state data; testing a lock flag associated with the spinlock state data and determining that the spinlock is in a locked state; waiting in a low power state until the memory address is accessed by a second processor by executing a memory wait operation that causes the first processor to enter the low power state and subsequently exit the low power state when the memory address is accessed by the second processor; testing the lock flag associated with the spinlock state data and determining that the spinlock is no longer in the locked state; indicating that the system resource is capable of being exclusively accessed by the first processor; clearing the lock flag to indicate that the spinlock has been released from the first processor; and upon determining that the spinlock has been released from the first processor, setting the priority level of the first processor back to the initial priority level.