10.3.2.8 RCU Usage Summary
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10.3.2.8 RCU Usage Summary

At its core, RCU is nothing more nor less than an API that provides:

1. a publish-subscribe mechanism for adding new data,
2. a way of waiting for pre-existing RCU readers to finish, and
3. a discipline of maintaining multiple versions to permit change without harming or unduly delaying concurrent RCU readers.

That said, it is possible to build higher-level constructs on top of RCU, including the reader-writer-locking, reference-counting, and existence-guarantee constructs listed in the earlier sections. Furthermore, I have no doubt that the Linux community will continue to find interesting new uses for RCU, as well as for any of a number of other synchronization primitives.