Read-Copy-Update for OpenSolaris

The goal of this thesis is to design and implement a RCU (Read-Copy-Update)synchronization mechanism for OpenSolaris. The main purpose of the RCU mechanism is to increase concurrency in readers-writers synchronization scenarios, especially in SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) environments. This improvement is achieved by keeping multiple versions of the protected data which enables readers and writers to run in parallel. The RCU synchronization has already been implemented multiple times and is used in the Linux kernel. The thesis includes analysis of existing RCU implementations, possible benefits of RCU in the ONNV (OpenSolaris) kernel and a prototype implementation in ONNV. It also suggests possible applications of RCU where lockless synchronization is already applied. The prototype implementation is compared with its counterpart in the Linux kernel