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Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 21:26:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: davidm@hpl.hp.com
cc: Gerrit Huizenga <gh@us.ibm.com>, Hubertus Franke <frankeh@watson.ibm.com>,
       <Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com>, <wli@holomorpy.com>,
       Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd) 
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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

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