A Non-Intrusive Read-Copy-Update for UTS

Read-Copy-Update (RCU) is a mechanism designed to increase the level of concurrency in readers-writer synchronization scenarios, vastly improving scalability of software running on multiprocessor machines. Most existing RCU variants have been developed for and studied within the Linux kernel. Due to strong dependency on the Linux internals, they cannot be easily transferred to other operating system kernels. This paper presents a novel non-intrusive variant of the RCU mechanism (AP-RCU), which depends only on basic kernel-level concepts while maintaining the scalability benefits. We have implemented AP-RCU in the Solaris kernel (UTS) and experimentally confirmed the expected benefits over traditional forms of synchronization, comparable with previous RCU implementations.