Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 6 Aug 2002 01:08:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 6 Aug 2002 01:08:33 -0400 Received: from pizda.ninka.net ([216.101.162.242]:42441 "EHLO pizda.ninka.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 6 Aug 2002 01:08:32 -0400 Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:58:17 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <20020805.215817.05805181.davem@redhat.com> To: davidm@hpl.hp.com, davidm@napali.hpl.hp.com Cc: rohit.seth@intel.com, frankeh@watson.ibm.com, torvalds@transmeta.com, gh@us.ibm.com, Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com, wli@holomorphy.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd) From: "David S. Miller" In-Reply-To: <15695.22556.128499.64377@napali.hpl.hp.com> References: <25282B06EFB8D31198BF00508B66D4FA03EA56CA@fmsmsx114.fm.intel.com> <15695.22556.128499.64377@napali.hpl.hp.com> X-Mailer: Mew version 2.1 on Emacs 21.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1014 Lines: 21 From: David Mosberger Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 22:01:16 -0700 In my opinion, this is perhaps the strongest argument *for* a separate "giant page" syscall interface. It will be very hard (perhaps impossible) to optimize superpages to work efficiently when the ratio of superpage/basepage grows huge (as, by definition, the kernel would manage them as a set of basepages). Actually, this is one of the reasons there was a lot of research into using sub-page clustering for large mappings in the TLB. Basically how this worked is that for a superpage, you could stick multiple sub-mappings into the entry such that you didn't need a fully physically contiguous superpage. It's talked about in one of the Talluri papers. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/