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In linux or a library for linux, is there an equivalent to critical section in win32?

I am aware of Mutex, but it is not the same as critical section since a critical section uses user-mode spinlock and an event object internally, and it is must be faster than mutex.

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Please be more precise about what you are looking for. As can be read in th wikipedia article about critical section, the application-level (user-space) critical section under linux uses mutex. – rozcietrzewiacz Jan 16 '12 at 10:08
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"it must be faster than a mutex" is not generally true, depends on how the mutex is implemented. Mutex implementations on Windows and Linux (pthreads) are potentially very different. – Mat Jan 16 '12 at 12:12
thank you. I thought the implementations of mutex in windows and linux are similar, because implementing it is widely known. – imays Jan 17 '12 at 7:18

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If you want something coming from kernel space, then you might want to look at semaphores (sem_overview(7)). You can built higher level constructs from a semaphore, like "event", "condition", "mutex" ("critical sections"). There are the older and newer interfaces in C. Some higher level languages like Python and Perl also expose the interface.

The "Mutex" that you are likely talking about is the pthread's mutex, which will be faster than anything in user space, especially one using a spinlock (which were designed for extremely low level OS level constructs). Some pthread's implementations may use an OS level semaphore or may use other constructs.

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