Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)

Linus Torvalds
2002-08-03T04:22:14Z

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, David Mosberger wrote:
>
> My terminology is perhaps a bit too subtle: I user "superpage"
> exclusively for the case where multiple pages get coalesced into a
> larger page. The "large page" ("huge page") case that you were
> talking about is different, since pages never get demoted or promoted.

Ahh, ok.

> I wasn't disagreeing with your case for separate large page syscalls.
> Those syscalls certainly simplify implementation and, as you point
> out, it well may be the case that a transparent superpage scheme never
> will be able to replace the former.

Somebody already had patches for the transparent superpage thing for
alpha, which supports it. I remember seeing numbers implying that helped
noticeably.

But yes, that definitely doesn't work for humongous pages (or whatever we
should call the multi-megabyte-special-case-thing ;).

Linus