Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/845507/rss

Seen from outside, the internals of the Linux kernel appear to be stable,
especially in subsystems like the memory-management subsystem. However,
from time to time, developers need to replace an internal
interface to solve a longstanding problem. One such
issue is contention on the lock used to protect essential
memory-management structures, including the page tables and virtual memory areas
(VMAs). Liam Howlett and Matthew Wilcox have been developing a new
data structure, called a “maple tree”, to replace the data structures
currently used for VMAs. This potentially big change in internal kernel
structures has been recently posted
for a review in a massive patch set.