I was wondering if the following invention of mine might be of use to Boost: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-threading-building-blocks/topic... (please __read_all__; thank you) Here are some performance numbers wrt my algorithm versus NPTL on Linux (fedora 10), and OpenSolaris: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming.threads/msg/3e7531657a11baf0 My invention has some very interesting properties that simply do not exist for 99% of all the other rw-mutex algorithms I have seen to date. It's 100% starvation free and has bounded wait time for readers and writers. Heck, even the Microsoft rw-mutex algorithm in Vista does not come close to that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa904937(VS.85).aspx They clearly state that their algorithm is not fair. The algorithm I have observed in OpenSolaris does not meet this goal as well. Another nice property is that the algorithm has wait-free fast-paths. If readers hit a fast-path, then they are going to get wait-free access to the protected data-structure. The same goes for writers. The underlying operation is a single atomic fetch-and-add operation: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-threading-building-blocks/topic... In fact, the algorithm only needs fetch-and-add; no stupid CAS-loops are required. Please take not that there are absolutely no loops in the algorithm; this is one reason why it's bounded time and starvation free. Also, it has conditional reader-to-writer upgrades and non-conditional writer-to-reader downgrade capabilities. This is something that does not exist in the Microsoft implementation, or even the OpenSolaris, or basically any Linux implementation I have observed. Same goes for OSX. Therefore, I think this particular algorithm might be of use to Boost. Any thoughts? Thank you all for you're valuable time; I really do appreciate it! :^)