Re: Page sizes supported by RISC-V

Jeff Law
2024-09-29T15:18:47Z

On 9/29/24 9:08 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
> I understand that not making a call in the specifications avoids the
> need to resolve these conflicts. But if you don't define a maximum page
> size there, it is effectively specified as 4096 bytes. This will cause
> problems if distributions targeting large systems want a larger page
> size because it better aligns with the kind of hardware they target.
> It's really bad for cross-distribution binary compatibility, something
> that's important outside the embedded space and probably necessary for
> mainstreaming.
>
> (Of course you know all this. 8-)
Yup. Once it's baked into one significant distro, it's doing to be
bloody hard to change. I'm sure we both remember the PPC pagesize stuff
from a few years back ;(

I strongly suspect the lack of specification here is mean to give
degrees of freedom to the implementors, but sometimes those writing the
specs don't really understand the implication of leaving things like
this unspecified and how much pain it really causes in the end.

Jeff