3 ms·

Apparently RCU abbreviates "reed-copy-update".

• nkurz 10y ago
  Yes, it's an abbreviation for "read-copy-update", but unfortunately it doesn't really mean that at all. Rather, it's shorthand for something like "Now that I've written the updated version of the data to a new location and atomically switched a pointer so that all new readers will use it, how will I know when all previous readers of the old version have finished so that I can reclaim the space that the old copy was using?" It's a terrible name, but an almost magically efficient approach for certain problems.