Read Copy Update HOWTO

Dipankar Sarma

dipankar@in.ibm.com

Kristin Thomas

kristint@us.ibm.com

2001-09-03

Revision History
Revision 0.12001-11-12Revised by: KET

This HOWTO is a concise guide to the Read-Copy Update mutual exclusion mechanism in the Linux kernel.


Table of Contents
1. Copyright and Legal Notice
2. Introduction
2.1. What is Read-Copy Update?
2.2. Why use Read-Copy Update?
2.3. Additional Resources
3. Description of RCU Primitives
3.1. struct rcu_head
3.2. call_rcu()
3.3. synchronize_kernel
3.4. Use of Memory Barriers
4. Applications of RCU
4.1. RCU for a Hash Table with refcnt
4.2. RCU for use with kmem_cache_free()
5. To Do
6. Contributions