> If everyone reads that book prior to posting/writing a blog about multi-threading or locking, there would be much less misinformation/confusion.

> The title for chapter 7 is "Spin Locks and Contention" and discusses various issues that Linus has outlined, including dangers of pure spin locks, fairness, designing NUMA aware locks, etc.

Just reading the Linux manpages would have been a good start:

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/pthread_spin_init.3.html#NOTES

Spin locks should be employed in conjunction with real-time
scheduling policies (SCHED_FIFO, or possibly SCHED_RR). Use of spin
locks with nondeterministic scheduling policies such as SCHED_OTHER
probably indicates a design mistake. The problem is that if a thread
operating under such a policy is scheduled off the CPU while it holds
a spin lock, then other threads will waste time spinning on the lock
until the lock holder is once more rescheduled and releases the lock.

If threads create a deadlock situation while employing spin locks,
those threads will spin forever consuming CPU time.

User-space spin locks are not applicable as a general locking
solution. They are, by definition, prone to priority inversion and
unbounded spin times. A programmer using spin locks must be
exceptionally careful not only in the code, but also in terms of
system configuration, thread placement, and priority assignment.