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.