In a lot of cases, programmers don't even care about fairness, but do care about starvation. Is there a word for structures like the one discussed here, that are unfair but appear to prevent unlimited starvation?
I don't think this lock is _guaranteed_ to prevent starvation, it just makes an effort at it. There's only two priority levels and a hard-coded 30 wake-ups required to enter high priority - if waiters were continually joining then there could always be more than one entry in high priority and an entry could get stuck there forever. Typically it won't matter, but if you have high contention then this might not be good enough.
