RCU's readers execute within "read-side critical sections", which are normally delimited by and . Any statement that is not within an RCU read-side critical section is said to be in a "quiescent state", and such statements are not permitted to hold references to RCU-protected data structures, nor is the wait-for-readers operation required to wait for threads in quiescent states. Any time period during which each thread resides at least once in a quiescent state is called a "grace period". By definition, any RCU read-side critical section in existence at the beginning of a given grace period must complete before the end of that grace period, which constitutes the fundamental guarantee provided by RCU. In addition, the wait-for-readers operation must wait for at least one grace period to elapse. It turns out that this guarantee can be provided with extremely small read-side overheads, in fact, in the limiting case that is actually realized by server-class Linux-kernel builds, the read-side overhead is exactly zero.