Visualization of Read-Copy-Update synchronization contexts in C code

Abstract

. The Read-Copy-Update (RCU) mechanism is a way of synchronizing concurrent access to variables with the goal of prioritizing read performance over strict consistency guarantees. The main idea behind this mechanism is that RCU avoids the use of lock primitives while multiple threads try to read and update elements concurrently. In this case, elements are linked together through pointers in a shared data structure. RCU is used in the Linux kernel, but there are user-space libraries which implement the technique as well. One of the user-space solutions is liburcu that is a C language library. Earlier, we defined our code comprehension framework for easing the development of RCU solutions. In this paper, we present our visualization techniques for the Microsoft’s Monaco Editor.