Introducing maple trees

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.

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