Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
This month in Kernel News: Chasing the Dream; The Power of the FUSE Side; NTFS3 Maintainership Issues: and Crashing and Warning.
Chasing the Dream
Liam Howlett, speaking for himself and Matthew Wilcox, recently announced the Maple Tree, which he wished to have included in Linux. Andrew Morton asked for a nice explanation of what the Maple Tree was. So, despite whatever lovely pastoral scene you might have envisioned would come next, Liam actually said, "the maple tree is an RCU-safe range based B-tree designed to use modern processor cache efficiently."
A B-tree is a data structure designed to let the user find and retrieve big pieces of data extremely efficiently. The "tree" in the name refers to a branching search path, where you ditch the wrong paths and narrow down the remaining search quickly. This is similar to the fun guessing game, where one person picks a secret number between 1 and 100 and then tells whether each of their friends' guesses is higher or lower than the secret number. However, instead of the "binary" high/low way of narrowing down the search, B-trees can split into more than two branches at a time.
As Liam put it, "With the increased branching factor, it is significantly shorter than the rbtree so it has fewer cache misses. The removal of the linked list between subsequent entries also reduces the cache misses and the need to pull in the previous and next VMA during many tree alterations."
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.