The invention relates to a spinlock-based multi-core synchronization technique in a real-time environment, wherein multiple processor cores perform spinning attempts to request a lock and the lock is allocated to at most one of the multiple cores for a mutually exclusive operation thereof. A method embodiment of the technique comprises the steps of allocating the lock to the first core requesting it; establishing for each core an indication of a waiting time for receiving the lock; selecting at least one of the spinning cores based on the waiting time indications; and, upon return of the lock, conditionally allocating the lock to the selected core, if the selected core performs a spinning attempt within a predefined time window starting with the return of the lock.