"We" is "infrastructure teams at Google". You apparently work there too, my username is the same. RCU is an overloaded name; it's both a family of implementati

"We" is "infrastructure teams at Google". You apparently work there too, my username is the same. RCU is an overloaded name; it's both a family of implementations of epochs, and a pattern for using epoch-like systems. The name literally refers to the latter (a read-mostly RWlock setup where we don't bother protecting the read side of a data structure, but _copy_ and atomically update access to the data, using epochs to dispose of the old version safely) but is often used to describe the whole system (tracking quiescence and determining when disposal is safe.) One could easily use the kernel's RCU (our my userspace one) to build a data structure like this.