What type of scenarios come up in RT/audio code where an alternative path is available if you can't get a lock? In most of the concurrent code I've written the options available if I can't get a lock is some subset of try again, try again with backoff, or fail.
Let's say you are doing audio processing in the real-time thread. You try to lock to read new parameters, and if you fail to get the lock you do the processing with the old parameters.
