3 ms·

I think it's a bummer that there aren't some option in between. I could see 64 meg pages being really nice. Ultimately it would be handy to be able to tune pa

I think it's a bummer that there aren't some option in between. I could see 64 meg pages being really nice. Ultimately it would be handy to be able to tune page size for the loads that you see. I could see page sizes jumping by 4x or 16x (2 bits or 4 bits) each time being reasonable. The real issue the author is talking about isn't "how much memory does a process allocate" but rather "how many total pages does the OS have to keep track of and what percentage of those fit in the TLB at any one time?"

etep 13y ago
If the real issue is simply to minimize the number of pages to track (and thereby maximize TLB hits) then its very simple: go to 1 GB (or higher!) pages. This hints that there is a tradeoff happening here. At the highest level, the tradeoff is between having efficient use of memory and TLB hits. Big pages give TLB hits, small pages make efficient use of memory. Since the TLB is in hardware, it is more difficult to have the fine-grain tuning you desire.