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
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
News
-
ExTiX 22.9 Released with Support for Installing Android Apps
The developers of the ExTiX Linux Distribution have released a new version that includes added support to make installing and using Android apps on the desktop a breeze.
-
System76 Skips Pop!_OS 22.10 to Focus on COSMIC Desktop
In a move that is sure to raise some eyebrows, System76 has chosen to concentrate on COSMIC Desktop instead of staying in step with Ubuntu releases.
-
New Look for System76 Thelio
System76 has given their already stellar Thelio desktop computer a redesign by way of the chassis accent panel.
-
Ubuntu Software Store Rumored to Replace Gnome Software
An alternative to GNOME Software has been written, using Flutter, and it’s making enough noise that Canonical is rumored to be considering using it as the default.
-
A New Arch-Based Linux Distribution Has Arrived
Crystal Linux is a new distribution with the goal of bringing the power of Arch Linux to the masses.
-
Fedora 37 Beta Available
The Fedora development team announced the beta for version 37 of the open-source operating system would be released on time on September 13, 2022.
-
Salix 15.0 Offers Updates and a Modernized Look
Salix is a Slackware-based Linux distribution with a new look and a goal of being fast, user-friendly, and highly stable.
-
Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS Release Now Available
The latest point release of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS distribution is now available and sports kernel 5.15.
-
MX Linux 21.2 Offers Improvements and Bug Fixes
MX Linux 21.2, aka “Wildflower,” is now officially available and is the second refresh of the MX-21 release.
-
Gnome Project Releases New Telemetry Data Collection Tool
The GNOME developers have announced the release of a new tool to collect anonymous information about your system.