Messages in this thread | | | From | Jesse Barnes <> | Subject | Re: Hugepages demand paging V2 [0/8]: Discussion and overview | Date | Mon, 25 Oct 2004 19:40:30 -0700 |
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On Monday, October 25, 2004 7:23 pm, William Lee Irwin III wrote: > On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 06:26:42PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote: > > - Clearing hugetlb pages is time consuming using clear_highpage in > > alloc_huge_page. Make it possible to use hw assist via DMA or so there? > > It's possible, but it's been found not to be useful. What has been found > useful is assistance from much lower-level memory hardware of a kind > not to be had in any extant mass-manufactured machines.
Do you have examples? SGI hardware has a so-called 'BTE' (for Block Transfer Engine) that can arbitrarily zero or copy pages w/o CPU assistance. It's builtin to the memory controller. Using it to zero the pages has the advantages of being asyncrhonous and not hosing the CPU cache.
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