Re: Getting big areas of memory, in 2.3.x?

Alan Cox
1999-12-10T00:37:55Z

> Then too, there is the matter of TLB misses for applications which
> visit a lot of data, especially on processors with reasonably large
> caches. With 4 KB pages and 64 TLB entries, the TLB cannot map all of
> a cache larger than 256 KB. If the cache is, say, 2 MB and the
> application cycles through many of the pages in the cache in a loop,
> you can wind up with a TLB miss for almost every load (other than those from
> the stack). With 1 MB pages, there are almost no TLB misses.

With very large amounts of memory I don't doubt this. X86 is alas crippled
with a choice of 4K, 2Mb or 4Mb pages.