Draft of 2005/01/30 16:00 Abstract

There is not yet a formal statement of RCU (read-copy update) semantics. While this lack has thus far not been an impediment to adoption and use of RCU, it is quite possible that formal semantics would point the way towards tools that automatically validate uses of RCU or that permit RCU algorithms to be automatically generated by a parallel compiler. This paper is a first attempt to supply a formal definition of RCU. Or at least a semi-formal definition: although RCU does not yet wear a tux (though it does run in Linux), at least it might yet wear some clothes.