On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 12:32:48AM +1100, Simon Burge wrote:

 > > if you could turn off interrupts [ ... ]
 > 
 > That's the key statement.  In userland, you can't turn off interrupts
 > at all - only the kernel can, hence the idea of a syscall.

Um.  This is pretty much what the System V "Semaphore" stuff was intended
for ... on MIPS-without-ll/sc, you could (should?) use semop(2).

(It would be nice to determine at run-time via a sysctl if you have
ll/sc, BTW :-)

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>