episode-54.xml

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  <title>RCU in Open vSwitch Userspace</title>
  <description>
    <p>
      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 <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read-copy-update">read-copy-update</a>,
      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 <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readers%E2%80%93writer_lock">readers-writer
      locks</a>, 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 <a
      href="http://liburcu.org/">liburcu</a>).
    </p>

    <p>
      The <a
      href="https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs/blob/master/lib/ovs-rcu.h">ovs-rcu.h</a>
      header from the OVS source repository is useful reading along with this
      episode.
    </p>

    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All
      content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
  <pubDate>Sat, 07 Apr 2018 21:01:08 GMT</pubDate>
</item>