Abstraction, Reality Checks, and RCU (abstract)
In an abstract sense, CPUs have changed very little over the past
couple of decades -- in many cases, 20-year-old binaries will run
on new machines. However, the performance characteristics of computers
systems has changed dramatically over this period of time, particularly
for SMP operating-system kernels such as Linux. This talk will
summarize some of these changes, and will give an overview of how
a recent synchronization mechanism, namely RCU ("read-copy update")
has greatly improved performance of algorithms involving read-mostly
data structures in the Linux kernel.