Hi Paul, > If MacOS doesn't have spinlocks, then from coreutils' point of view MacOS > doesn't have proper thread support.
Usually in applications mutexes are used, not spinlocks. The comments in sort.c say: "Note spin locks were seen to perform better than mutexes as long as the number of threads is limited to the number of processors." In other words, spinlocks were chosen instead of mutexes only for performance reasons. So, instead of turning off the entire thread-based parallelization on MacOS X, why not use mutexes instead of spinlocks on this platform? Bruno
