[jabl]

Wrt lock design, IIRC Linus writing something along that every time they optimize throughput by getting rid of fairness they have to come back and add fairness later on. That doesn't mean that both fairness and throughput are incompatible, high-performance locking designs are often unfair in the short term to provide the performance boost from avoiding unnecessary context switching, but there is some mechanism to ensure that on a slightly longer timescale nobody is starved.