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Glossary
The following definitions help illuminate the concepts underlying
RCU.
- Live Variable:
- A variable that might be accessed before it is next modified,
so that its current value has some possibility of influencing
future execution state.
- Dead Variable:
- A variable that will be modified before it is next accessed, so that
its current value cannot possibly have any influence over future
execution state.
- Critical Section:
- A region of code that is protected from outside interference
by some locking mechanism, such as spinlocks or RCU.
- Read-Side Critical Section:
- A region of code that is protected from other CPUs' modifications,
but which allows multiple CPUs to read simultaneously.
- Temporary Variable:
- A variable that is only live inside a critical section. One
example is an auto variable used as a pointer while traversing
a linked list.
- Permanent Variable:
- A variable that is live outside of critical sections. One example
would be the header for a linked list.
Although it is possible for the same variable to be
temporary sometimes and permanent at other times,
this practice can lead to confusion, so is not generally
recommended.
Relying on the register-allocation capabilities
of modern optimizing compilers is usually a far
better strategy.
- Quiescent State:
- A point in the code where all of the current CPU's temporary
variables that were previously in use in a critical section
are dead.
In a non-preemptive Linux kernel, a context switch is a quiescent
state for CPUs.
In a preemptive Linux kernel,
rcu_read_lock()
and rcu_read_unlock()
suppress preemption for
short read-side critical sections,
so that context switch is still
a quiescent state with respect to these read-side critical
sections.
Although there are implementations of RCU that
do not require preemption to be suppressed [Gamsa99,McK02a],
they can be prone to excessively long grace periods.
- Grace Period:
- Time interval during which all CPUs
pass through at least one quiescent state.
The key property of a grace period is that the values
that were contained in any temporary variable in use in
a critical section at the
beginning of the grace period cannot possibly have
any direct effect after the end of the grace period.
This property will be examined more closely in the next
section.
Note that any time interval containing a grace period is
itself a grace period.
Next: Concepts
Up: Background
Previous: Example
Paul McKenney
2003-03-28