Read Copy Update HOWTO

Dipankar Sarma

dipankar@in.ibm.com

Kristin Thomas

kristint@us.ibm.com

2001-09-03

Revision History
Revision 0.1	2001-11-12	Revised 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()

6. Contributions

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		Copyright and Legal Notice