Re: Huge pages and small pages. . .

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 01:52:20PM -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
> Is there anything in the kernel that shifts the physical pages for 1024
> physically allocated and contiguous virtual pages together physically
> and remaps them as one huge page?  This would probably work well for the
> low end of the heap, until someone figures out a way to tell the system
> to free intermittent pages in a big mapping (if the heap has an
> allocation up high, it can have huge, unused areas that are allocated).
>  It may possibly work for disk cache as well, albeit I can't say for
> sure if it's common to have a 4 meg contiguous section of program data
> loaded.
> Shifting odd huge allocations around would be neat to, re:
> {2m}[4M  ]{2m}  ->  [4M  ][4M  ]

I've got bugs and feature work written by others that has sat on hold
for ages to merge, so I won't be looking to experiment myself.

Do write things yourself and send in the resulting patches, though.


-- wli