Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)

[David S. Miller]

   From: David Mosberger <[e-mail]>
   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.