Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/906852/

The kernel is, in many ways, a marvel of scalability, but there is a
longstanding pain point in the memory-management subsystem that has
resisted all attempts at elimination: the mmap_lock. This lock
was inevitably a topic at the 2022 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), where the idea of
using per-VMA locks was raised. Suren Baghdasaryan has posted
an implementation of that idea — but with an interesting twist on how
those locks are implemented.