Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)

Linus Torvalds
2002-08-03T19:48:19Z

On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Hubertus Franke wrote:
>
> But I'd like to point out that superpages are there to reduce the number of
> TLB misses by providing larger coverage. Simply providing page coloring
> will not get you there.

Superpages can from a memory allocation angle be seen as a very strict
form of page coloring - the problems are fairly closely related, I think
(superpages are just a lot stricter, in that it's not enough to get "any
page of color X", you have to get just the _right_ page).

Doing superpages will automatically do coloring (while the reverse is
obviously not true). And the way David did coloring a long time ago (if
I remember his implementation correctly) was the same way you'd do
superpages: just do higher order allocations.

Linus