Introduction to RCU

Here are some general overviews of RCU:

1. What is RCU? guest lecture slides.

2. 2013 ACM Queue Schroedinger's Zoo article.
3. The RCU section of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About
It?. This section also includes a list of RCU implementations.
4. Exploiting Deferred Destruction: An Analysis of Read-Copy-Update Techniques in
Operating System Kernels.

Overviews of RCU use cases:

1. Unraveling RCU-Usage Mysteries (Fundamentals) (slides), Linux Foundation Live

Mentorship Series.
2. Unraveling RCU-Usage Mysteries (Additional Use Cases) (slides), Linux Foundation
Live Mentorship Series.

Here are some introductions to Linux-kernel RCU:

1. The LWN “What is RCU?” series:

1. What is RCU, Fundamentally? with Jonathan Walpole (bibtex).
2. What is RCU? Part 2: Usage (bibtex).
3. RCU part 3: the RCU API (bibtex).
2. The LWN “The RCU API” series:
1. The RCU API, 2010 Edition.
2. The RCU API, 2014 Edition.
3. The RCU API, 2019 Edition.
3. The LWN “RCU Requirements” series (updated in the Linux kernel source tree at
Documentation/RCU/Design/Requirements):
1. Requirements for RCU part 1: the fundamentals
2. RCU requirements part 2 — parallelism and software engineering
3. RCU requirements part 3
4. Those wishing to dive in the deep end have these options:
1. Linux-Kernel RCU Design Documents
2. The Linux-kernel source code itself, mainly in include/linux/*rcu* and
kernel/rcu.

How much is RCU used in the Linux kernel?

These expand on the older “What is RCU?” introduction. The Wikipedia article also has some
good (if outdated) information. In addition, Linux Weekly News has a long list of RCU-related
articles.

Implementing RCU
The following papers describe how to implement RCU, in roughly increasing order of
accessibility:

1. Lockdep-RCU.
2. RCU: The Bloatwatch Edition (optimized for uniprocessor operation) (bibtex).
3. Sleepable Read-Copy Update (SRCU), revision of Linux Weekly News article (bibtex).
4. The classic PDF revision of PDCS'98 paper on DYNIX/ptx's RCU implementation
(bibtex).
5. The February 2012 IEEE TPDS paper (bibtex) is the best source of information on what
RCU is, how to implement it in userspace, and how it performs. The pre-publication
accepted version of this paper may be found here (main paper) and here (supplementary
materials). Some of the material in this paper came from Mathieu Desnoyers's Ph.D.
dissertation (bibtex).
6. Using Promela and Spin to verify parallel algorithms at Linux Weekly News (bibtex).
Includes description of QRCU implementation.
7. My Ph.D. dissertation on RCU, which includes descriptions of a number of early
implementations (bibtex).
8. The design of preemptable read-copy update (Linux Weekly News article) (bibtex).
Please be warned: this is a detailed design document of the most complex known RCU
implementation. This implementation has since been replaced by a faster, simpler, and
more scalable implementation, and an update of the documentation is pending. In the
meantime, slides 80 (PDF page 70) and subsequent of RCU's First-Ever CVE, and How
I Lived to Tell the Tale (video) demonstrate some of the key concepts.

There is an RCU to-do list that is updated sporadically.

There is also some research on the general family of algorithms of which RCU is a member
(bibtex) and an annotated bibliography. Alexey Gotsman, Noam Rinetzky, and Hongseok Yang
have produced a formalization of RCU based on separation logic. An executable formalization
of RCU was presented in the 2018 ASPLOS paper entitled Frightening Small Children and
Disconcerting Grown-ups: Concurrency in the Linux Kernel (lightning talk, presentation), by
Jade Alglave, Luc Maranget, Paul E. McKenney, Andrea Parri, and Alan Stern.

Read-Copy Update (RCU) Publications

A more-complete list in reverse chronological order.
2023
1. March 2023 So What Has RCU Done Lately? at Everything Open with Neeraj Upadhyay,
Boqun Feng, Frederic Weisbecker, Joel Fernandes, and Uladzislau Rezki.

2022
1. October 2022 Sleepless RCU Grace Periods Without rcu_head at the Alpine Linux
Persistence and Storage Summit.
2. September 2022 Unraveling Fence & RCU Mysteries (C++ Concurrency Fundamentals)
CPP Summit.
3. September 2022 RCU Office Hours BoF Linux Plumbers Conference.
4. September 2022 Concurrency TS 2 Use Cases and Future Direction, with Michael Wong
and Maged Michael, CPPCON.
5. May 2022 Recent Linux-Kernel RCU Changes LSF/MM (LWN report, video).
6. February 2022 Unraveling RCU-Usage Mysteries (Additional Use Cases) (slides), Linux
Foundation Live Mentorship Series.
7. February 2022 P2545R0: Why RCU Should be in C++26, with Michael Wong, Maged M.
Michael, Geoffrey Romer, Andrew Hunter, Arthur O’Dwyer, Daisy Hollman, JF Bastien,
Hans Boehm, David Goldblatt, Frank Birbacher, Erik Rigtorp, Tomasz Kamiński, and
Jens Maurer. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
8. January 2022 So You Want to Torture RCU? (slides), linux.conf.au Kernel Miniconf.

2021
9. December 2021 Unraveling RCU-Usage Mysteries (Fundamentals) (slides), Linux
Foundation Live Mentorship Series.
10. October 2021 The Upcoming Concurrency TS Version 2 for Low-Latency and Lockless
Synchronization with Michael Wong and Maged Michael, CPPCON.
11. September 2021 So you want to torture RCU? (video), Linux Plumbers Conference
Refereed Track.
12. May 2021 P1122R4: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures:
Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, David
Goldblatt, Frank Birbacher, Erik Rigtorp, Tomasz Kamiński, and Jens Maurer. ISO SC22
WG21 (C++ Language).
13. March 2021 Does RCU Work? And If So, How Would We Know?, Northern Arizona
University CS 499/599 guest lecture, Professor Alex Groce.
14. March 2021 P1122R3: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures:
Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, David
Goldblatt, Frank Birbacher, Erik Rigtorp and Tomasz Kamiński. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++
Language).
2020
15. July 2020 RCU Usage In the Linux Kernel: One Decade Later (ACM DOI), ACM
SIGOPS Operating Systems Review.
16. April 2020 An HTM-based update-side synchronization for RCU on NUMA systems
(paper, slides), EuroSys ’20: Proceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on
Computer Systems.
17. April 2020 Concurrency bugs should fear the big bad data-race detector (part 2) Linux
Weekly News.
18. April 2020 Concurrency bugs should fear the big bad data-race detector (part 1) Linux
Weekly News.

2019
19. November 2019 What is RCU?, guest lecture to Portland State University CS 533
Operating Systems (Prof. Bruce Irvin).
20. June 2019 A Critical RCU Safety Property Is... Ease of Use!!! (paper), Systor 2019.
21. January 2019 The RCU API, 2019 edition Linux Weekly News.
22. January 2019 RCU's First-Ever CVE, and How I Lived to Tell the Tale, linux.conf.au 2019
(video).

2018
23. November 2018 P1122R2: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures:
Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, David
Goldblatt, Frank Birbacher, and Erik Rigtorp. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
24. September 2018 The Exciting New Future of Safe Reclamation for High Performance
with Maged Michael and Michael Wong in absentia.
25. July 2018 P1122R1: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures:
Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, David
Goldblatt, and Frank Birbacher. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
26. June 2018 P1122R0: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures:
Read-Copy-Update (RCU) , with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, David
Goldblatt, and Frank Birbacher. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
27. May 2018 P0566R5: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard Pointer
and Read­Copy­Update, with Michael Wong (lead author), Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey
Romer, Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm,
David Goldblatt, Frank Birbacher. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
28. April 2018 P1022R0: Material for 2018 JAX Discussions of Hazard Pointer and
Read-Copy-Update (RCU) , with Michael Wong, Maged M. Michael, Geoffrey Romer,
 Andrew Hunter, Arthur O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, and David
Goldblatt. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
29. March 2018 Verification of Tree-Based Hierarchical Read-Copy Update in the Linux
Kernel, with Lihao Liang, Daniel Kroening, and Tom Melham (University of Oxford),
Design, Automation, & Test in Europe (DATE18).
30. February 2018 P0750R1: Consume, with JF Bastien (lead author). ISO SC22 WG21
(C++ Language).
31. February 2018 P0566R4: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard
Pointer and Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong (overall lead author), Maged
M. Michael (lead author for Hazard Pointers), Geoffrey Romer, Andrew Hunter, Arthur
O'Dwyer, David S. Hollman, JF Bastien, Hans Boehm, and David Goldblatt. I am lead
author for RCU. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
32. February 2018 P0868R1: Selected RCU Litmus Tests, with Alan Stern, Andrew Hunter,
Jade Alglave, and Luc Maranget. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
33. January 2018 Can RCU and CPU Hotplug Survive the Attack of the Killer Virtual
Environments?, linux.conf.au.
34. January 2018 Decoding Those Inscrutable RCU CPU Stall Warnings: They are for your
own good! Honest!!!, linux.conf.au Kernel Minisummit.

2017
35. November 2017 P0868R0: Selected RCU Litmus Tests, with Alan Stern and Andrew
Hunter. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
36. October 2017 P0566R3: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard
Pointer and Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong (overall lead author), Maged
M. Michael (lead author for Hazard Pointers), Geoffrey Romer, Andrew Hunter, and
Arthur O'Dwyer. I am lead author for RCU. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
37. October 2017 P0461R2 Proposed RCU C++ API, with Maged Michael, Michael Wong,
Isabella Muerte, Arthur O'Dwyer, David Hollman, Andrew Hunter, Geoffrey Romer, and
Lance Roy. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
38. October 2017 P0233R6: Hazard Pointers: Safe Reclamation for Optimistic Concurrency,
with Maged M. Michael (lead author), Michael Wong, Arthur O'Dwyer, David Hollman,
Geoffrey Romer, and Andrew Hunter. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
39. October 2017 What Is RCU?, guest lecture to Carnegie Mellon University (Prof. Dave
Eckhardt).
40. September 2017 Hardware and its Habits, CPPCON 2018, part of a larger concurrency
presentation with Michael Wong and Maged Michael (video).
41. September 2017 What Is RCU?, guest lecture to the Indian Institute of Science (Prof. K.
Gopinath).
42. September 2017 Decoding Those Inscrutable RCU CPU Stall Warnings “They are for
your own good! Honest!!!”, Open Source Summit North America.
43. September 2017 Beyond the Issaquah Challenge: High-Performance Scalable Complex
Updates at Silicon Valley Linux Users Group.
44. July 2017 P0566R2: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard Pointer
and Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong (overall lead author), Maged M.
Michael (lead author for Hazard Pointers), Geoffrey Romer, and Andrew Hunter. I am
lead author for RCU. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
45. July 2017 P0233R5: Hazard Pointers: Safe Reclamation for Optimistic Concurrency, with
Maged M. Michael (lead author), Michael Wong, Arthur O'Dwyer, David Hollman,
Geoffrey Romer, and Andrew Hunter. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
46. June 2017 P0190R4: Proposal for New memory_order_consume Definition, with Michael
Wong, Hans Boehm, Jens Maurer, Jeffrey Yasskin, and JF Bastien. ISO SC22 WG21
(C++ Language).
47. June 2017 P0566R1: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard Pointer
and Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong (overall lead author), Maged M.
Michael (lead author for Hazard Pointers), Geoffrey Romer, and Andrew Hunter. I am
lead author for RCU. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
48. June 2017 P0233R4: Hazard Pointers: Safe Reclamation for Optimistic Concurrency,
with Maged M. Michael (lead author), Michael Wong, Arthur O'Dwyer, David Hollman,
Geoffrey Romer, and Andrew Hunter. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
49. March 2017 Applying Mutation Analysis On Kernel Test Suites: An Experience Report
with Iftekhar Ahmed, Rahul Gopinath, Carlos Jensen, and Alex Groce at 12th
International Workshop on Mutation Analysis.
50. March 2017 RCU and the mid-boot dead zone Linux Weekly News.
51. February 2017 Does RCU Really Work? And if so, how do we know? at Multicore World
(extended presentation).
52. February 2017 P0566R0: Proposed Wording for Concurrent Data Structures: Hazard
Pointer and Read-Copy-Update (RCU), with Michael Wong (lead author) and Maged M.
Michael (lead author for Hazard Pointers). I am lead author for RCU. ISO SC22 WG21
(C++ Language).
53. February 2017 P0233R3: Hazard Pointers: Safe Reclamation for Optimistic
Concurrency, with Maged M. Michael (lead author), Michael Wong, Arthur O'Dwyer, and
David Hollman. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
54. February 2017 P0462R1: Marking memory_order_consume Dependency Chains, with
Torvald Riegel, Jeff Preshing, Hans Boehm, Clark Nelson, Olivier Giroux, Lawrence
Crowl, JF Bastien, and Micheal Wong. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
55. February 2017 P0461R1: Proposed RCU C++ API, with Maged Michael, Michael Wong,
Isabella Muerte, Arthur O'Dwyer, and David Hollman. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
56. February 2017 P0190R3: Proposal for New memory_order_consume Definition, with
Michael Wong, Hans Boehm, Jens Maurer, Jeffrey Yasskin, and JF Bastien. ISO SC22
WG21 (C++ Language).
57. February 2017 P0233R2: Hazard Pointers: Safe Reclamation for Optimistic
Concurrency, with Maged M. Michael (lead author), Michael Wong, and Arthur O'Dwyer.
ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
58. January 2017 Does RCU Really Work? And if so, how do we know? guest lecture to
Northern Arizona University NAU 499 class. (Alex Groce)
 59. January 2017 Does RCU Really Work? And if so, how do we know? at the linux.conf.au
Kernel minisummit.

2016
60. November 2016 Towards Formal Verification in Linux-Kernel Regression Testing,
Dagstuhl Seminar Concurrency with Weak Memory Models: Semantics, Languages,
Compilation, Verification, Static Analysis, and Synthesis. November 2016.
61. October 2016 P0461R0: Proposed RCU C++ API, with Maged Michael, Michael Wong,
Isabella Muerte, and Arthur O'Dwyer. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
62. October 2016 P0279R1: Read-Copy Update (RCU) for C++, ISO SC22 WG21 (C++
Language).
63. October 2016 P0098R1: Towards Implementation and Use of memory order consume,
with Torvald Riegel, Jeff Preshing, Hans Boehm, Clark Nelson, Olivier Giroux, and
Lawrence Crowl. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
64. October 2016 Tracing and Linux-Kernel RCU at Tracing Summit (video).
65. September 2016 A lock-free concurrency toolkit for deferred reclamation and optimistic
speculation at CPPCON, with Michael Wong and Maged Michael (video).
66. September 2016 RCU and C++ at CPPCON (video).
67. September 2016 Beyond the Issaquah Challenge: High-Performance Scalable Complex
Updates at CPPCON.
68. June 2016 High-Performance and Scalable Updates: The Issaquah Challenge, at ACM
Applicative Conference.
69. May 2016 P0190R2: Proposal for New memory_order_consume Definition, with Michael
Wong, Hans Boehm, Jens Maurer, Jeffrey Yasskin, and JF Bastien. ISO SC22 WG21
(C++ Language).
70. March 2016 P0190R1: Proposal for New memory_order_consume Definition, with
Michael Wong, Hans Boehm, and Jens Maurer. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
71. February 2016 What Happens When 4096 Cores All Do synchronize_rcu_expedited()?,
at linux.conf.au (video).
72. February 2016 P0279R0: Read-Copy Update (RCU) for C++, ISO SC22 WG21 (C++
Language).
73. February 2016 P0232R0: A Concurrency ToolKit for Structured Deferral/Optimistic
Speculation, with Michael Wong (lead author) and Maged Michael. ISO SC22 WG21
(C++ Language).
74. February 2016 P0190R0: Proposal for New memory_order_consume Definition, with
Michael Wong, Hans Boehm, and Jens Maurer. ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
75. February 2016 Mutation Testing and RCU, at linux.conf.au Kernel Miniconf.

2015
76. December 2015 Read-mostly research in 2015 Linux Weekly News.
 77. November 2015 How Verified is My Code? Falsification-Driven Verification with Alex
Groce, Iftekhar Ahmed, and Carlos Jensen at the 30th IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).
78. September 2015 P0098R0: Towards Implementation and Use of
memory_order_consume, ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).
79. September 2015 C++ Atomics: The Sad Story of memory_order_consume: A Happy
Ending At Last? at CPPCON (video).
80. July-August 2015 Requirements for RCU part 1: the fundamentals, RCU requirements
part 2 — parallelism and software engineering, and RCU requirements part 3, Linux
Weekly News.
81. May 2015 Dagstuhl Seminar 15191 “Compositional Verification Methods for
Next-Generation Concurrency”:
1. Formal Verification and Linux-Kernel Concurrency
2. Linearizability: Who Really Needs It?
3. Some Examples of Kernel-Hacker Informal Correctness Reasoning
82. May 2015 Dagstuhl Seminar: Compositional Verification Methods for Next-Generation
Concurrency Blog post.
83. April 2015 N4483: Read-copy-update, ISO SC22 WG21 (C++ Language).

2014
84. November 2014 Recent read-mostly research, Linux Weekly News.
85. November 2014 Read-Copy Update (RCU) Validation and Verification for Linux Galois
Tech Talk.
86. August 2014 Axiomatic validation of memory barriers and atomic instructions Linux
Weekly News.
87. September 2014 C++ Memory Model Meets High-Update-Rate Data Structures
CPPCON (video).
88. September 2014 The RCU API, 2014 Edition, Linux Weekly News.
89. May 2014 Towards Implementation and Use of memory_order_consume ISO SC22
WG21 (C++ Language) Official version: (N4036) (revised N4215 2014-10-05, revised
N4321 2014-11-20).
90. May 2014 Non-Transactional Implementation of Atomic Tree Move (4037) ISO SC22
WG21 (C++ Language).
91. May 2014 What Is RCU?, presented to TU Dresden Distributed OS class (Instructor
Carsten Weinhold).

2013
92. November 2013 User-space RCU, Linux Weekly News, with Mathieu Desnoyers, Lai
Jiangshan, and Josh Triplett. Subparts of this article are: URCU-protected hash tables,
The URCU hash table API, URCU-protected queues and stacks, The URCU
stack/queue API, User-space RCU: Atomic-operation and utility API, User-space RCU:
 Memory-barrier menagerie, The user-space RCU API, The RCU-protected list API, The
RCU-barrier menagerie,
93. November 2013 What Is RCU?, guest lecture to University of Cambridge (Prof. Peter
Sewell).
94. October 2013 Introduction to RCU Concepts: Liberal application of procrastination for
accommodation of the laws of physics — for more than two decades, LinuxCon Europe
2013 (part of Mathieu Desnoyers's Hands-On Tutorial on Scalability with Userspace
RCU).
95. May 2013 What Is RCU?, presented to TU Dresden Distributed OS class (Prof. Hermann
Härtig).
96. May 2013 What Is RCU? (video), presented to Indian Institute of Science (IISc) (Prof. K.
Gopinath).
97. May 2013 Structured Deferral: Synchronization via Procrastination, ACM Queue.
98. October 2013 Simplifying RCU Linux Weekly News.
99. January 2013 What is RCU?, The SIGPLAN Programming Languages Mentoring
Workshop.

2012
100. October 2012 The new visibility of RCU processing Linux Weekly News.
101. August 2012 Real-Time Response on Multicore Systems: It Is Bigger Than You
Think, Scaling Microconference, Linux Plumbers Conference.
102. May 2012 What Is RCU? presented to TU Dresden Distributed OS class (Prof.
Hermann Härtig).
103. February 2012 Making RCU Safe For Battery-Powered Devices presented to the
Embedded Linux Conference.
104. February 2012 User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update (bibtex) covering
what RCU is, how to implement it in userspace, and how it performs. The pre-publication
accepted version of this paper may be found here (main paper) and here (supplementary
materials).

2011
105. July 2011 3.0 and RCU: what went wrong.
106. January 2011 Concurrent code and expensive instructions Linux Weekly News.

2010
107. December 2010 The RCU API, 2010 Edition.
108. August 2010 Scalable Concurrent Hash Tables via Relativistic Programming (bibtex).
109. February 2010 Lockdep-RCU describing software-engineering enhancements to the
Linux-kernel RCU implementations (bibtex).
110. January 2010 Simplicity Through Optimization (presentation) (bibtex).
2009
111. March 2009 RCU: The Bloatwatch Edition Linux Weekly News.
112. January 2009 Using a Malicious User-Level RCU to Torture RCU-Based Algorithms,
at linux.conf.au (bibtex). Describes several user-level RCU implementations, and
describes how they can be used to validate kernel-level code using RCU.

2008
113. November 2008 Hierarchical RCU, in Linux Weekly News (bibtex). Describes a
Linux-kernel RCU implementation designed to scale to thousands of CPUs.
114. July 2008 Introducing technology into the Linux kernel: a case study in ACM
SIGOPS Operating System Review, with Jon Walpole (updated to include RCU changes
through the 2.6.36 Linux kernel) (bibtex).
115. May 2008 The read-copy-update mechanism for supporting real-time applications on
shared-memory multiprocessor systems with Linux in IBM Systems Journal, with Dinakar
Guniguntala, Josh Triplett, and Jon Walpole (bibtex).
116. April 2008 Integrating and Validating dynticks and Preemptable RCU Linux Weekly
News.
117. February 2008 Introducing Technology into Linux (bibtex), or "Introducing your
technology into Linux will require introducing a LOT of Linux into your technology!!!" at
the 2008 Linux Developer Symposium - China (revised). (Chinese translation of original.)
118. January 2008 RCU part 3: the RCU API at Linux Weekly News (bibtex).

2007
119. December 2007 What is RCU? Part 2:Delete-only list Usage at Linux Weekly News
(bibtex).
120. December 2007 What is RCU, Fundamentally? at Linux Weekly News with Jonathan
Walpole (bibtex).
121. December 2007 Performance of Memory Reclamation for Lockless Synchronization
in the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, with Tom Hart, Angela Demke
Brown, and Jonathan Walpole (bibtex). (Journal version of the IPDPS'06 paper.)
122. October 2007 The design of preemptable read-copy update at Linux Weekly News
(bibtex).
123. August 2007 Using Promela and Spin to verify parallel algorithms at Linux Weekly
News (bibtex). Includes proof of correctness for QRCU.
124. February 2007 "Priority-Boosting RCU Read-Side Critical Sections", revision of
earlier Linux Weekly News version (bibtex).
125. February 2007 Priority-Boosting RCU Read-Side Critical Sections Linux Weekly
News.
126. January 2007 RCU and Unloadable Modules Linux Weekly News.
2006
127. October 2006 "Sleepable Read-Copy Update", revision of earlier Linux Weekly News
version (bibtex).
128. July 2006 "Extending RCU for Realtime and Embedded Workloads" with Dipankar
Sarma, Ingo Molnar, and Suparna Bhattacharya at OLS'2006 (bibtex), and
corresponding presentation.
129. April 2006 "Making Lockless Synchronization Fast: Performance Implications of
Memory Reclamation", with Tom Hart and Angela Demke. IPDPS 2006 Best Paper.
Paper (bibtex). Presentation.

2005
130. August 2005 Sleepable RCU Linux Weekly News.
131. July 2005 Abstraction, Reality Checks, and RCU presented at University of Toronto's
"Cider Seminar" series (abstract).
132. April 2005 paper (revised) and presentation describing Linux realtime and yet more
modifications to RCU to enable even more aggressive realtime response (bibtex).
Presented at the 2005 linux.conf.au.
133. January 2005 RCU Semantics: A First Attempt with Jon Walpole (bibtex). Technical
report: engineering math meets RCU semantics.

2004
134. December 2004 James Morris's Recent Developments in SELinux Kernel
Performance paper describes how RCU helped scalability of the SELinux audit vector
cache (AVC). (I didn't have any involvement in creating this paper, but believe that it is
well worth bringing to your attention.)
135. June 2004 paper describing modifications to the Linux RCU implementation to make
it safe for realtime use (bibtex).
136. May 2004 dissertation and presentation from Ph.D. defense (bibtex). Also some
advice for others who are embarking on a part-time Ph.D. program, and the
announcement.
137. January 2004 paper and presentation for RCU performance on different CPUs at
linux.conf.au in Adelaide, Australia (bibtex).
138. January 2004 Scaling dcache with RCU (bibtex).

2003
139. October 2003 Linux Journal introduction to RCU (bibtex).
140. PDF revision of FREENIX'03 paper (focusing on use of RCU in Linux's System-V
IPC implementation) and corresponding presentation (bibtex).
 141. Enabling Autonomic Behavior in Systems Software With Hot Swapping (bibtex):
describes how a RCU (AKA "generations") is used in K42 to enable hot-swapping of
implementations of kernel algorithms.

2002
142. PDF revision of OLS'02 paper (focusing on Linux-kernel infrastructure) and
corresponding presentation (bibtex).

2001
143. PDF revision of OLS'01 paper (oriented to Linux kernel) and corresponding
presentation (bibtex).
144. PDF revision of RPE paper (more theoretical).
145. rclock-2.4.1-01.patch by Dipankar Sarma, which is probably the best public guide to
the details of the DYNIX/ptx rclock implementation (alternative source).

1998
146. PDF revision of PDCS'98 paper (DYNIX/ptx) (bibtex).
147. Read-Copy Update: Using Execution History to Implement Low-Overhead Solutions
to Concurrency Problems. Introduction to read-copy update.
148. (slightly outdated) HTML version.

Linux RCU Work

The best summary of Linux RCU work is graphical, and may be found here.

Some selected RCU patches:

1. RCU was accepted into the Linux 2.5.43 kernel. Patches to RCU were applied to the
2.5.44 and 2.5.45 kernels. RCU was thus fully functional in 2.5.45 and later Linux
kernels, just in time for the Halloween functionality freeze. ;-)
2. Patch to the System V IPC implementation using RCU was accepted into the Linux
2.5.46 kernel.
3. Patch providing a lock-free IPv4 route cache was accepted into the Linux 2.5.53 kernel.
4. Patch providing lock-free handler traversal for IPMI handling, added to the Linux 2.5.58
kernel.
5. Patch providing lock-free lookup of directory entries in the dcache subsystem, added to
the Linux 2.5.62 kernel.
6. Patches to replace many uses of brlock with RCU in the 2.5.69 kernel, with brlock being
entirely eliminated in the 2.5.70 kernel.
7. NMI handling for oprofile uses RCU in the 2.5.73 kernel.
 8. Fix ppc64 {pte,pmd}_free vs. hash_page race with RCU in the 2.6.2 kernel.
9. Additional patches to the Linux kernel apply RCU to FD-set management, task-list
traversal, and i_shared_sem contention reduction.
10. Yet more patches change RCU's API to conserve memory and stack space.
11. Another patch to monitor RCU grace period.
12. Another patch to apply RCU to fasync_lock, perhaps for the 2.7 timeframe.
13. Another set of patches apply modifications to the RCU infrastructure to make it safe for
soft-realtime use (0/2, 1/2, 2/2).
14. The Reiser4 filesystem uses RCU to defer freeing of jnodes.
15. An auditing patch uses RCU to guard the lists of auditing rules.
16. An SELinux scalability patch uses RCU to guard the audit vector cache, with 500x
improvement in write() throughput on 32 CPUs, and about 50% improvement on 2
CPUs.

K42 RCU Work

1. K42 is a research OS at IBM that uses RCU pervasively as an existence lock. K42
developed RCU independently, as described in the Gamsa paper.
2. K42 also uses RCU as a basis for hot swapping.