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– All of these are used for synchronization
Difference
Mutex provides one person to access a single resource at a time, others must wait in a queue. Once this person is done, the guy next in the queue acquires the resource.
So access is serial, one guy after another. There is a context switch of the requester thread if the mutex is unavailable.
Semaphore is useful if multiple instances (N) of a resource are shared among a set of users. As soon as all N resources are acquired, any new requester has to wait. Since there is no single lock to hold, there is as such no ownership of a semaphore.
Spinlock is an aggressive mutex. In mutex, if you find that the resource is locked by someone else, you (the thread/process) switch the context and start to wait (non-blocking).
Whereas spinlocks do not switch context and keep spinning. As soon as the resource is free, they go and grab it. In this process of spinning, they consume many CPU cycles. Also, on a uni-processor machine, they are useless and perform very badly.
Simplify Complexities 
You make it look as spinlocks are bad, and actually they are good if processes release the lock quickly because spinlocks don’t make the OS reschedule them, thus being efficient if the wait time of locking is little.
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yes, you are right. Spinlocks are efficient for small wait time and avoid process context switch.
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