Another approach is formal verification, and in fact RCU's guarantees have been formally verified. Unfortunately, these formal-verification efforts, groundbreaking though they are, must be considered to be one-off tours de force. In contrast, RCU needs regular regression testing.
This leaves rcutorture, which has the advantage of being tireless and reasonably thorough, especially when compared to human beings. Except that rcutorture does not currently test RCU's memory-barrier guarantees.
Or at least it did not until today.
A new commit on the -rcu tree enlists the existing RCU readers. Each reader frequently increments a free-running counter, which can then be used to check memory ordering: If the counter appears to have counted backwards, something is broken. Each reader samples and records a randomly selected reader's counter, and assigns some other randomly selected reader to check for backwardsness. A flag is set at the end of each grace period, and once this flag is set, that other reader takes another sample of that same counter and compares them.
Of course, the reality is a bit more involved, and probably will become even more involved as review and testing proceeds. But in the meantime, the interested reader can find the initial state of this rcutorture enhancement here.
The test strategy for this particular fundamental property of RCU is more complex and likely less effective than the memory-ordering property described earlier, but life is like that sometimes.
