<p>
Furthermore, uncertainty about external state is inherent in many cases.
-For example, a pair of veternarians might use heartbeat to determine
+For example, a pair of veterinarians might use heartbeat to determine
whether or not a given cat was alive.
But how long should they wait after the last heartbeat to decide that
the cat is in fact dead?
and life more than 100 times per minute.
Moreover, just as with human beings, a cat's heart might stop for
some period of time, so the exact wait period is a judgment call.
-One of our pair of veternarians might wait 30 seconds before pronouncing
+One of our pair of veterinarians might wait 30 seconds before pronouncing
the cat dead, while the other might insist on waiting a full minute.
-The two veternarians would then disagree on the state of the cat during
+The two veterinarians would then disagree on the state of the cat during
the final 30 seconds of the minute following the last heartbeat.
<p>
<ol>
<li> It is all too easy to forget to use <tt>rcu_read_lock()</tt>
everywhere that it is needed, so kernels built with
- <tt>CONFIG_PROVE_RCU=y</tt> will spat if
+ <tt>CONFIG_PROVE_RCU=y</tt> will splat if
<tt>rcu_dereference()</tt> is used outside of an
RCU read-side critical section.
Update-side code can use <tt>rcu_dereference_protected()</tt>,
<li> Blocking is prohibited.
In practice, this is not a serious restriction given that idle
tasks are prohibited from blocking to begin with.
-<li> Although nesting <tt>RCU_NONIDLE()</tt> is permited, they cannot
+<li> Although nesting <tt>RCU_NONIDLE()</tt> is permitted, they cannot
nest indefinitely deeply.
However, given that they can be nested on the order of a million
deep, even on 32-bit systems, this should not be a serious
<h3><a name="Tasks RCU">Tasks RCU</a></h3>
<p>
-Some forms of tracing use “tramopolines” to handle the
+Some forms of tracing use “trampolines” to handle the
binary rewriting required to install different types of probes.
It would be good to be able to free old trampolines, which sounds
like a job for some form of RCU.