What's a pushlock?

Question

Pushlocks are used internally by windows as synchronization primitives for some of its operations, specifically as part of the memory manager.

What exactly is a pushlock? How is it different from a spinlock?

Answer 1

Pushlocks, together with mutexes, synchronization events, semaphores and executive resources are WAIT-based.

In the other hand, spinlocks, queue spinlocks are, etc. are, well... of "spin" type, implemented by busy-waiting (spinning).

The choice of a particular synchronization primitive is discussed in depth in this article.