- The common-case RCU primitives are unconditional, and
- RCU users can perform a guaranteed read-to-write upgrade.
The first guarantee is trivially verified by inspection of the RCU API. The type of rcu_read_lock(), rcu_read_unlock(), synchronize_rcu(), call_rcu(), and rcu_assign_pointer() are all void. These API members therefore have no way to indicate failure. Even primitives like rcu_dereference(), which do have non-void return types, will succeed any time a load of their pointer argument would succeed. That is, if you do rcu_dereference(*foop), where foop is a NULL pointer, then yes, you will get a segmentation fault. But this segmentation fault will be unconditional, as advertised!
The second guarantee is a consequence of the first four guarantees, and must be tested not within RCU itself, but rather within the code using RCU to carry out the read-to-write upgrade.
Thus for these last two fundamental guarantees there is no code in rcutorture. But maybe even rcutorture deserves a break from time to time! ;–)
