LinuxCon Europe 2013: Hands-on Tutorial on Scalability with Userspace RCU
Mathieu Desnoyers on 21 October 2013
As the number of cores in systems steadily increases, you may find that the good old mutual exclusion synchronization is not sufficient to let your application use more cores not only for heat generation, but primarily for effective computing. The Userspace RCU library (http://lttng.org/urcu) implements Read-Copy Update (RCU) synchronization and various lock-free data structures that allow user-space applications to leverage very lightweight synchronization across cores. It allows a broad range of demanding applications to scale to large numbers of cores. This library is released under LGPL v2.1, so it can be used by all applications. This tutorial will walk the audience through the basics of Read-Copy Update, and then through the synchronization and data structure APIs exposed by Userspace RCU.