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User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update
February 2012 (vol. 23 no. 2)
pp. 375-382
ASCII Text
x 
 
Mathieu Desnoyers, Paul E. McKenney, Alan S. Stern, Michel R. Dagenais, Jonathan Walpole, "User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 375-382, February, 2012.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TPDS.2011.159,
author = {Mathieu Desnoyers and Paul E. McKenney and Alan S. Stern and Michel R. Dagenais and Jonathan Walpole},
title = {User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems},
volume = {23},
number = {2},
issn = {1045-9219},
year = {2012},
pages = {375-382},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TPDS.2011.159},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
TI - User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update
IS - 2
SN - 1045-9219
SP375
EP382
EPD - 375-382
A1 - Mathieu Desnoyers,
A1 - Paul E. McKenney,
A1 - Alan S. Stern,
A1 - Michel R. Dagenais,
A1 - Jonathan Walpole,
PY - 2012
KW - Synchronization
KW - process management
KW - operating systems
KW - software/software engineering
KW - threads
KW - concurrency.
VL - 23
JA - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
ER -
 
Mathieu Desnoyers, EfficiOS Inc., Montréal
Paul E. McKenney, IBM Linux Technology Center, Beaverton
Alan S. Stern, Rowland Institute at Harvard, Cambridge
Michel R. Dagenais, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal
Jonathan Walpole, Portland State University, Portland
Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization technique that often replaces reader-writer locking because RCU's read-side primitives are both wait-free and an order of magnitude faster than uncontended locking. Although RCU updates are relatively heavy weight, the importance of read-side performance is increasing as computing systems become more responsive to changes in their environments. RCU is heavily used in several kernel-level environments. Unfortunately, kernel-level implementations use facilities that are often unavailable to user applications. The few prior user-level RCU implementations either provided inefficient read-side primitives or restricted the application architecture. This paper fills this gap by describing efficient and flexible RCU implementations based on primitives commonly available to user-level applications. Finally, this paper compares these RCU implementations with each other and with standard locking, which enables choosing the best mechanism for a given workload. This work opens the door to widespread user-application use of RCU.

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Index Terms:
Synchronization, process management, operating systems, software/software engineering, threads, concurrency.
Citation:
Mathieu Desnoyers, Paul E. McKenney, Alan S. Stern, Michel R. Dagenais, Jonathan Walpole, "User-Level Implementations of Read-Copy Update," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 375-382, Feb. 2012, doi:10.1109/TPDS.2011.159
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