Definition of RCU [LWN.net]

Definition of RCU

Posted Oct 14, 2006 22:03 UTC (Sat) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624)
In reply to: Definition of RCU needed by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Sleepable RCU

My apologies for leaving out this definition!!!

RCU does indeed stand for read-copy update. The name comes from the fact that readers continue to freely access the data structures even while another thread is making and substituting a copy in order to update. More information may be found at:

http://lwn.net/Articles/37889/ (though from 2003, guess I need to get Jon an update...) -- and Jon has written quite a bit about RCU, as you can see from Googling "read copy update site:lwn.net".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCU (I update this, so please let me know if you find bugs.)
http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/

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Definition of RCU

Posted Oct 16, 2006 4:19 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCU
> (I update this, so please let me know if you find bugs.)

Presumably you update a copy whilst we read the previous version :-)

Updating wikipedia

Posted Oct 16, 2006 13:12 UTC (Mon) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624) [Link]

;-) ;-) ;-)

But as near as I can tell, that is exactly what happens. Although I have no idea what algorithm wikis use to accomplish this.