[arielby]

According to the paper, it simply makes everywhere outside of data structure code a quiescent state. This may be a big difference in practice through, because one of the appeals of RCU is being able to interact with data structures with no fear of following dangling pointers.

However, with both RCU and the epoch-based scheme, you can make quiescent states as fine- or coarse-grained as you desire.

[aturon]

"According to the paper, it simply makes everywhere outside of data structure code a quiescent state" -- yes, from a per-thread point of view, but of course all the hard work is in detecting global quiescence.