Ignore the benchmark for a moment; the original issue is that a real program (the game Rage 2) uses spin locks, and experiences really terrible hangs on Linux and not on the other kernels. What he wanted was for that to not happen. The upshot is that there really is no way to get spinlocks to not hang on Linux. Now, there's a very good argument that spinlocks are just dumb, and therefore that real game is broken.