A small nit. You are not documenting the most subtle memory barrier: smp_read_barrier_depends(); Which is a deep requirement of the RCU code.
As I understand it. On some architectures (alpha) without at least this a load from a pointer can load from the an old pointer value. At one point it was suggested this be called: read_memory_barrier_data_dependent(). Simply calling: rcu_dereference is what all users should call but the semantics should be documented at least so that people porting Linux can have a chance of getting it right. Eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
