The io context sharing introduced a per-ioc spinlock, that would protect
the cfq io context lookup. That is a regression from the original, since
we never needed any locking there because the ioc/cic were process private.
The cic lookup is changed from an rbtree construct to a radix tree, which
we can then use RCU to make the reader side lockless. That is the performance
critical path, modifying the radix tree is only done on process creation
(when that process first does IO, actually) and on process exit (if that
process has done IO).
As it so happens, radix trees are also much faster for this type of
lookup where the key is a pointer. It's a very sparse tree.