Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:50:00 +1100 | From | Paul Mackerras <> | Subject | Re: larger default page sizes... |
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David Miller writes:
> From: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> > Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:29:55 +1100 > > > The performance advantage of using hardware 64k pages is pretty > > compelling, on a wide range of programs, and particularly on HPC apps. > > Please read the rest of my responses in this thread, you > can have your HPC cake and eat it too.
It's not just HPC, as I pointed out, it's pretty much everything, including kernel compiles. And "use hugepages" is a pretty inadequate answer given the restrictions of hugepages and the difficulty of using them. How do I get gcc to use hugepages, for instance? Using 64k pages gives us a performance boost for almost everything without the user having to do anything.
If the hugepage stuff was in a state where it enabled large pages to be used for mapping an existing program, where possible, without any changes to the executable, then I would agree with you. But it isn't, it's a long way from that, and (as I understand it) Linus has in the past opposed the suggestion that we should move in that direction.
Paul.
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