10.3.2.1.3 Realtime Latency

Because RCU read-side primitives neither spin nor block, they offer excellent realtime latencies. In addition, as noted earlier, this means that they are immune to priority inversion involving the RCU read-side primitives and locks.

However, RCU is susceptible to more subtle priority-inversion scenarios, for example, a high-priority process blocked waiting for an RCU grace period to elapse can be blocked by low-priority RCU readers in -rt kernels. This can be solved by using RCU priority boosting [McK07d,GMTW08].



Paul E. McKenney 2011-12-16