RCU in Open vSwitch Userspace

This is the first in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is particularly about read-copy-update, or RCU for short, which is a synchronization technique that allows reads to be very cheap (almost free), with some memory cost. This talk covers reasons why RCU can be preferred over other techniques, such as readers-writer locks, and its relationship with lockless synchronization and reference counts. It also covers some of the RCU API within OVS (and why OVS has its own API instead of using liburcu). The ovs-rcu.h header from the OVS source repository is useful reading along with this episode. OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.