As multicore processors become increasingly prevalent, system complexity is skyrocketing. The advent of the asymmetric multicore compounds this – it is no longer practical for an average programmer to balance the system constraints associated with today’s multicores and worry about new problems like asymmetric partitioning and thread interference. Adaptive, or self-aware, computing has been proposed as one method to help application and system programmers confront this complexity. These systems take some of the burden off of programmers by monitoring themselves and optimizing or adapting to meet their goals. This paper introduces a self-aware synchronization library for multicores and asymmetric multicores called Smartlocks. Smartlocks is a spin-lock library that adapts its internal