MGLRU Merged For Linux 6.1

[fitzie]

maple tree is another datastructure contribution by matthew wilcox to provide a tree datastructure that supports ranges and provides rcu capabilities. his previous work was improving the radix tree api (which he called xarray). he gives great talks and it seems he really focuses on making the apis easy to use for developers.

It seems the RCU capabilities of the Maple Tree is not implemented yet. more detail in this lfsmm submit discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12GNb53g3ZA

[arQon]

At least some of the members of this forum complain about abysmal performance (due to memory pressure) when they open thousands of windows/tabs on their desktop, and this may help them (at least some of the time).

It's not "thousands". It's not even *"dozens"*, and that's on a 4GB machine. You massively underestimate the bloat of the modern web.

Even without that, it's trivial to fill memory. VMs, containers, and so on have made it so that even 16GB means a machine is under-provisioned even *without* a hundred tabs of garbage in a browser, and Linux's inability to cope with that in anything resembling a sane way is one of the most significant problems the entire ecosystem currently has. When trying to start even a trivial program locks a machine solid for minutes even with swap on an SSD - or, worse, sets off a garbage oomd that wipes out hours of work - something is flat-out *broken*.

I'm not one of the people with weak machines, but blaming them for the OS's failures is both dishonest and a big part of why this has taken *decades* to actually get (mostly) fixed.

[kylew77]

It's not "thousands". It's not even *"dozens"*, and that's on a 4GB machine. You massively underestimate the bloat of the modern web.

The fact that midrange Chromebooks can ship with 4GB of RAM and you have to search pretty high up the market for an 8GB or 16GB model and that they run well is a testament to MGLRU. I had a 4GB Chromebook and used it from 2016 to 2021 and only had one hard power off because I ran out of memory and I abused the heck out of that 4GB of RAM asking it to open a couple dozen Chrome tabs!